hardly unexpected they cant make a joined up plan
We all know Microsoft is really a confederation of divisions, not quite at war with each other but rarely cooperating with any enthusiasm. This time Ballmer put marketing and the planners in charge of bludgeoning their way into phones and tablets in charge and they aren't listening to any feedback, not customer feedback and it seems not internal either.
Tools got away with just dumbing down the chrome on their UIs because those users were always going to use desktop mode. Still caused a flood of complaint. Office have been ordered to do the impossible, fit a complex, high precision UI onto an inherently low precision, sparse GUI toolkit... and it's not easy, possibly not really possible. Maybe the delays are Office just refusing to play, more likely it's just the impossibility of the making full fat tools work in low fat Metro, iOS or Android.
At some point HQ will have to decide if the great Windows infestation plan is better served by shipping apps cut down to what works with deficient mobile and touch UIs. To stop pretending full versions of Office on those devices are a credible sales tool for the greater Win8 plan. ATM it looks like that will take the complete failure of Win8 before Microsoft changes anything and they won't see it coming because they have their eyes shut.