Well in Brandons defense, announcing in April that what you have planned for in June isn't going to happen is not quite the same thing as waiting until the day of the release to state its not going to happen.
I too would rather it work when they release it instead of them releasing it THEN waiting more months waiting for a patch to fix some BS issue.
In Apple's defense, it's quite possible that they were working on a fix to a bug that cropped up late in development, and they believed that the fix would pan out, only to have it fail and come to the conclusion that some whole module needed to be rewritten. In short, as of the 28th or 29th, they may have believed that they could still make the 31st deadline, only to have their efforts fail. So, you announce a delay when you are pretty certain that you're not going to meet it, not if you think that you might miss it. That's just good PR. And we just don't know when they became certain that it the problem that they were dealing with was too big to finish in time.
And then run 4+ separate apps just to sync my phone? No thanks.
Uh, no. Do you run iPhoto to sync the photos from your iPhoto library? Nope. You'd have one app that would handle syncing, but it would have access to the libraries from iPhoto, iTunes, iBooks, iFilms, etc. To me, this is a sensible move, though I'd keep audiobooks, podcasts and music all in iTunes. Thus you'd have an app for audio (iTunes), an app for photos (iPhoto), an app for movies and TV shows (iFilms, or whatever you want to call it), and an app for reading material (iBooks, or, perhaps, iBookShelf, which could include emagazines, too).