I think we might be seeing is Apple acknowledging that journalists are going to have "blind men and an elephant"[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant] problems, and arranging to have a sufficient number of blind men feel the elephant to get the whole description, and all tell their stories at once only makes sense.
You've got Gruber talking about only on the most visible features, but spending more thought on corporate communication strategy and iCloud directions.
Jason Snell articulates new features as clearly as I'd expect from an Apple "New in Mountain Lion" page.
Edward Mendelson I think covers even more features, but not as clearly as Jason Snell, and I think his vision of "AirPlay display to TV" -> "Mac is video game console" is fatally doomed by latency.[1] But it's ok. We have enough people touching the elephant and describing it to dilute that.
So here you have the new strategy for non-event announcements. Arrange for simultaneous views from multiple, competent sources. Let the first sounds in the echo chamber be accurate and well informed to keep the erroneous speculation to a minimum.
EOM
[1] I could also be wrong here. With gigabit 802.11ac just around the corner, one could conceive of a TV device that optimized the latency from wifi to screen. You know, by tearing apart the industry's entrenched model and doing their own vision. But I'm just groping an elephant here.
The difference is that other journalists who got the preview also write about other products, whereas Gruber only writes about Apple.
When an Apple-exclusive blog gets preferential treatment and news scoops directly from Apple, it's reasonable to ask whether it's anything more than Phil Schiller's astroturfing outlet.
Gruber has a rabid following of hardcore apple lovers. Just the kind of people who are going to be most interested in these announcements. They would be dumb not to get him involved in this type of release (which I think we'll see more of in the future).
