I’m inclined to believe your reasons for Apple not having this product ready yet.

Although it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple had access to a processor ahead of its release.

1. The chip is very new. Apple could not have had time to build and test a system around so new a chip. True, they sometimes announce new products that will ship later, but a 17″ Macbook Pro is not a new product. There is current demand for the 17″ upgrade, and announcing that we’ll have to wait months for the system to be built and tested will not make people happy.

2. Quad core chips don’t offer much overall performance improvement to programs not optimized to work with multiple cores. 3D rendering, some Photoshop, and video editing are the primary purposes for the chip, and most of those are done on Mac Pros. The four cores just won’t give the average user any worthwhile improvement.

3. The chip’s current maximum clock speed is 2 GHz. While many people know GHz alone is not a fair measure of a chip’s performance, those people are not in the majority. When I go online to Apple to buy a laptop, I want a fast chip. The 2.4 GHz chip is a $1400 MacBook looks 20% faster than the 2 GHz chip is a MBP that costs twice as much. That’s what people will see.

Expect the chip to start showing up in MBPs when Snow Leopard ships. Snow Leopard’s improved support for multi-core processors will make this chip more useful across the board. Until then, it’s in the lab.