It's because Apple aren't going to tell us
Apple are a prominent technology company, who are sometimes the first to succeed commercially in a field. They sell only about a dozen different products in total, so changes to any product are newsworthy. However they don't generally announce their plans in advance, so there's often speculation. Sites like El Reg like to carry stories that their readers will find interesting so they like to provide information that allows their readers to speculate.
So: gussying is caused by the official information vacuum.
Some companies don't adopt the same tactic because they're more connected to outside ecosystems, making it more likely that people would just feed on information supplied by another company instead and forget about them.
If you look at the phenomenon of vapourware you'll see that some companies have played exactly the other way — releasing information about products that they never launch, sometimes maliciously.
So it's definitely not true that everybody else would play it like Apple if they could, even if it is true that Apple's ability to get free publicity for doing absolutely nothing is enviable.