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They routinely ask for this to keep it under wraps as long as possible to delay competitors. Any delay helps.
While most smartphones have their specifications disclosed before even the first pre-order is taken, the iPhone 4 has managed to secure 600,000 pre-orders without disclosing all its specs for consumers to use in unbiased comparison with other handsets.

What CPU is in my Mazda 3? What about my Microwave? How about the CPU in my Garmin GPS watch? or my washing machine? How many Gigahertz? Megabytes? Level whatchamacallit of RAM?

Why would a phone or tablet or even a laptop be any different? The critical factor is that yes, it will have enough of whatever it needs to multi-task in iOS 4.0.

The times they are a changing. Phones and tablets and netbooks and laptops are becoming consumer appliances.

You may not have asked what CPU is in your Mazda 3 when you were looking to buy it, but you most likely asked what MPG it gets, what its safety rating is, and how powerful its engine is.

If you're using you're phone as a platform to run applications, it makes sense to inquire into its specifications in order to understand whether it makes economic sense to buy one (whether its increased speed and DPI justifies the cost).

It doesn't make sense to inquire if you know it works with everything in the app store. That's the difference.
Battery life is to the iPhone as MPG is to cars. And Apple did provide that information, it even touted it as a improvement.
raganwald completely got the anologies wrong. Unless he buys his next car online which would be soon to be released without looking at what features it has (e.g. mpg, v6 or v8,HP, leather trim or not). He sees Luxus brand and just buys it. Since I hope he doesn't, he needs to choose better anology
"Wow, Apple is being secretive; how weird. Since this is the only reason I can think of, this must be it."

Logic is outside, beating it's head on the sidewalk.

If there is a big surprise, speculation I've seen elsewhere includes...

Pentaband GSM for maximal worldwide compatibility

CDMA

WiMax

FM Radio

...or simply hiding incrementally-improved specs like the recently-uncovered larger (512MB) RAM.

And occam's razor says... (the RAM)
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Why would they even want to hide a CDMA-compatible radio if it were in the iPhone?

You'd think they'd want to make sure every single Verizon customer knows that there's a Verizon iPhone coming soon so that people eligible to upgrade their phones now might wait for the iPhone instead of buying, say, an Android phone.