If the hardware manufacturers would have dragged their feet- like they did with HD- we'd still be waiting on 4G networks today.
You appear to THINK that hardware manufacturers will apparently not innovate unless forced to by GOV mandates. Once again, Apple formally embraced 4K yesterday... just not in this ONE product. The GOV didn't make them do it. They did it because they wanted to embrace it. As such, software that takes advantage of it will come along to go with the software that Apple developed that also takes advantage of that new camera. It would make no sense to develop such software BEFORE there was known hardware.
And it makes no sense to take the stance that there must be a bunch of 4K

TV video in the iTunes store BEFORE there are any 4K

TVs on which to play them. That would be a tremendous waste of time & money by content owners making software available for something that doesn't exist (and thus 0% opportunity to profit). It just sounds good as rationale... implying that there is scant 4K content available so why should Apple embrace 4K in an

TV. All one has to do though is think about this to recognize that only one of the two can come first.
Now, I'm going to go buy a bunch of apps that can only run on the A10 processor that doesn't exist yet. The software companies have certainly loaded the app store with such software even though there's no such hardware on which it can run.