Perhaps there were contracts with manufacturers that would have been more expensive to back out of at the last minute. It's also hugely demoralizing to a team to work on something for a couple years and then see it never ship because of mismanagement many levels above them. They probably ran the numbers and saw it was cheaper to pay X million to ship a shoddy device vs. a greater Y million to back out of contracts, perhaps lose team members in frustration, etc.

See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.