And why is this such a surprising thing to you?

As an example, take a Jolla, and hand it to someone without letting them walk through the tutorial with zero exposure to the UI or its paradigms, and they won't be able to switch applications, because it's "different". And then they'll accidentally end up with the notifications feed, etc, etc, etc. This is why the device tutorial exists, and this is why new users - like your typical journalist would be - are put through that tutorial.

Also, unreleased software can be (and often is) incredibly broken in a million different ways.

You give that to someone from the press, and they discover that the browser plays five frames of video from youtube and crashes for instance because of some work-in-progress bug, and congratulations, instead of "Jolla is working hard on their software" as a headline, you just earned "Jolla's phone can't even play video".

Initial experience is everything with someone who isn't a "convert". I spoke about this before, but I really don't think you realise just how hard dealing with someone who knows nothing about all of this can be. To draw a sort-of-parallel, you might have just a matter of minutes at best to try get them to understand how things work and get them on your "side". Crashing software and having to spend those five minutes manually explaining/demoing the software, for instance, are going to ruin your chance for such an initial experience.

And if that person is publically covering your product, they might ruin your initial experience with a much wider audience.

And you don't think that warrants any care at all?