The spec isn't even real yet - it's due to be published in the next four weeks. There won't be supporting chipsets for months - they can't design the chipsets until they have the final spec. HDMI v1.3 was published in June and the PS3 used the first transmitter chipset that November, but receiver chipsets didn't arrive until the following year and those early transmitter chipsets didn't support all of the features because they were so heavily rushed through development to fit the PS3's schedule (that's why the PS3 can't bitstream the new formats even though it's a "v1.3" product). I'd expect a lag of at least a year between the arrival of the official spec and any shipping hardware that supports it, and it could easily be longer.
There's no question that the R-972 is late, but I never believed that Sherwood could beat companies like Onkyo, Yamaha, and Denon to market - for that matter, even getting to market in the same general time frame was unlikely. Anthem, who rolled out HDMI v1.1 in a surround processor when nobody else would by building it into their existing AVM platform, has only had HDMI v1.3 in their processor for maybe six months. (One of the BDP-83 beta testers swapped out his Statement D2 for a D2v during the beta, and he was one of the first to get his hands on one.)