I used to accuse Nokia of doing the same thing. They never seemed to put all features into ONE device, so there wasn't any perfect device to be bought, even though collectively, all the features existed. At first I thought that maybe it would make the product too expensive, but then I started suspecting that if Nokia released "THE ULTIMATE" phone, there wouldn't be any incentive for people to buy a new version in a year or two.

Same thing for Apple. They could do a lot more, but choose not to for several reasons. One being that if they added a front facing camera from the start with APIs to control it, you wouldn't be nearly as likely to buy a new iPhone a year from now...

Just imagine when the next iPad comes out and it DOES have a front facing camera, how Steve will be frothing at the mouth, telling us how beauuutiful and amazing and awesome it is to video chat with his friend John Appleseed.

The other reason is that they don't want to release this feature until they have perfected it. That's one thing I really admire with Apple (have to admit it). They take a feature and (almost) perfect it and release it with the next product update, usually working better than all the competitors.