No it's not strange. The MBPs are (were?) great, reliable tools on which thousands of professionals rely on every day. They also rely on being able to replace them with equivalent or better replacements when they break.

They work. There's no need for needless new gimmicks. It's fine to have a reliable, consistent tool available for purchase. Just like Thinkpads, hammers and multimeters. It's ok to be conservative on new things in some market segments.

This release is essentially a "we messed up, this is what you wanted all long", but they can't say that so they're using the regular MBP marketing talk.

Not hating - I am getting this laptop.

This release is more of a "we listened" release than anything else. That's likely why they didn't parade it around with an October event and instead went with a private press review and press release.

Well, that or you could look at it like this: They made a new 1.6 inch macbook pro three years ago with all kinds of design, performance, and battery life but the keyboard turned out to be highly defective and the Touchbar's replacement of the escape key was super annoying, that laptop got generally lamented and trashed by the press and public. (If you are not a hardcore function key user and the keyboard has not broken yet, it's a pretty fantastic laptop, generally still the best at first, but obviously based on your needs and the worry of having the kb break)

So you can see this as an improvement to the current gen MBP.. or you can see this as a selling item to those who skipped the 2016 and still have a 2015 (or who had a 2016 and got burned). When you are drowning your goals are not to get on a ship or to go someplace, they are to get air.

Trying, failing, and backtracking is an inherent part of innovation. It's not as sexy as trying and succeeding, but even Apple can't win them all, so the alternative is never trying. That would be the real stagnation.

Well to be honest there's very little fanfare around this MacBook by Apple but it just happens to let the internet explode a bit because so many people were waiting for it.