but that's not how LTE is being promoted. LTE is the goal everybody is shooting for. It's the next great thing. HSPA+ is just a step on the ladder and will soon be behind us.
"Soon" ? A couple of points. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. It is designed to a transition to leaving both what is colloquially called CDMA and GSM behind. Those old telephony systems are both being put out to pasture. Pragmatically what is going to happen is that for the next several years you'll get phone with both technologies because the service providers are not going to turn off the "old" stuff for a long while. ( not till 90+% of all customers have the "old"+"new" phones... that is going to take a while).
In short LTE itself will get left behind too. ( all of these get "left behind" over a 2-4 year period. That is only from the bleeding edge. Not from deployment. )
Your HSPA phones still do EDGE now. The LTE phones will have at least one , if not both, legacy technologies built in also.
The other factor is that phones are competing of late on more than just radios. There is "dual core" versus the 'ancient' single core models. Likewise the new phones are pitched as gaming machines. Again the new ones have much better graphics.
There are at least a dozen features Apple can touch one as being marketing talking points for the iPhone5 that have nothing to do with the cell radio. For example, if they wanted to talk "fast" radios maybe than can add Bluetooth 4 to the iPhone like it has been added to the latest Macs.
Likewise the primary folks upgrading will be coming off 3G's and 3GS's . The same iPhone 4 feature improvements.... display , camera , etc. come into play. The iPhone 4 will probably get chopped down to 8GB of Flash so if need 16/32GB of storage... iPhone5 is going to be only choice. (LTE radio or not). You can also bet that Apple will be pitching the fact that there are "1,000's" more apps for the iPhone. (you can choose from 50 iFart apps. )
Are the Android LTE offerings going to hammer away at lack of LTE. Sure.
That isn't only feature iOS/iPhones are lacking with respect to Android. Besides, it is a mistake to let your competitors dictate what your marketing talking points are.
Are some folks going to wait? Sure. But Apple doesn't have to sell a phone to every single 3G/3GS owner this year.