An Apple First: a Pre-announcement

This morning Apple came out with a press release pre-announcing the iCloud service. I can't remember such a practice in the past 10+ years. What happened for Apple to suddenly "ruin" the surprise ?
One can posit that with all the rumors about iCloud making the rounds these pas few weeks, there wasn't much of a surprise left to....surprise anyone with. But there has to be more to the story.
My thought is that Apple are trying to lower certain iPhone-specific expectations. Most industry pundits are no doubt expecting an iPhone 5 announcement, or at the very least an iPhone 4S. Maybe this is Apple's not so subtle way of telling us to expect something else. But knowing them, Jobs might still pull a now famous "one more thing" and drop a new iPhone on us anyway. All will be answered on June 6 - D Day.