TDP is the machine's intended heat dissipation ability. The Retina MacBook Pro's thinness, shared heat pipes (the GPU and CPU share the same heat pipe, complicating matters), and limited power AC adaptor make it difficult to make it more powerful.
1) Being thin w/long battery life means that half the space in the rMBP is battery. Since Li-On batteries cannot be packed more densely, it's a pure compromise between battery capacity and cooling space. Also, just being thin makes the laptop run hotter.
2) The MacBook's design is kinda stupid, at least from a cooling perspective. There's a set of heat pipes that connect the CPU and GPU, and lead out to the fans. This conducts heat away from the core components and out of the computer, but it also allows significant inter-component heating. For example, running Furmark (zero CPU usage, maximum GPU torture usage) would bump my 2011 MacBook's GPU to 99C and my CPU to 85C. The design itself is not conducive to cooling powerful components, especially not power-draining GPUs.
3) Power consumption is often overlooked. While an extreme example, the NVIDIA GTX 780M is the fastest mobile graphics chip in the world -and has a power consumption (and TDP) to match. 100W. The chip in the current MacBooks, the GT650M, consumes (and dissipates) 45W. The next true step up, the GTX 670M, consumes 75W (the GTX 660M consumes 50W, but is just a higher clocked GT650M). Seeing the problem here? Not only can the current cooler not dissipate this much heat, the wall adaptor tops out at 85W.