Incorrect assessment. The same can be said that it makes little sense for Apple to provide 1080p content until the infrastructure can support it.
The tech crowd is a SMALL market compared to the consumer market that buys these devices. Apple does not care about you and your 1080p content. They care about selling a device that sells an optimal experience and right now 720p is about the best that the average consumer can handle in bandwidth. Cabled bandwith is increasing, but consumers are moving to wireless and lets face it, consumer wifi and cell carrier data rates aren't close to supporting 720p well yet either.
For the home movies you create, 720p what you can record with Apple video recording devices (your iPod and iPhone4). Youtube and Netflix aren't close to 1080p yet for the same reason's Apple doesn't care for 1080p and neither will support it until the broadband infrastructure plays catchup.
1080p is driven by the Blu-ray and pirate crowds. Those consumers in that crowd are not Apple's target audience.
You live in whatever illusions you want. Apple most wants to sell as many hardware units as possible. That is the primary driver: sell lots of hardware. They don't maximize volume by NOT selling hardware to those that want something like this particular thing.
Revenues Apple makes on iTunes media is secondary. Sure, they want us to rent & buy media like crazy, but mostly because that further hooks us into iTunes DRM, which motivates more hardware purchases in the future.
Why give us iMovie with 1080p editing & rendering? Why give us iTunes with 1080 video storage & playback? Why give us Quicktime with 1080 playback? Why have FC Express & FC Pro heavily oriented toward HD and better qualities?
I appreciate your stance, and even some of your reasoning. You obviously can't appreciate mine because you can only see this exactly as it best fits what you think Apple has delivered in this $99 box. So, if
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1023131/ leads to the revelation that this new

TV CAN playback 1080p, I expect you to flip flop and post a bunch of passionate arguments against Apple's "dumb" decision to build hardware overkill into this little box... in spite of the threat to bandwidth, in spite of no 1080p content in the iTunes store, in spite of the potential need for bigger hard drives for local storage, and so on.
Else, if you quickly flip to the "rah, rah, we also have 1080p" side, it will show how committed you are to your beliefs... and how fast your passions change coinciding with what Apple chooses to deliver.
You lose nothing if it has 1080p hardware. It will affect you in NO WAY. You can still choose 720p rentals, download them within the very same bandwidth, and they will play back exactly the same on better hardware. It doesn't cost you more, nor impact you AT ALL. If "720p is good enough" for you, you got it. Congratulations. Why find such fault with those of us that don't feel exactly the same as you do?