Well put. Although someone makes a LTS distribution, it really does not mean 3rd parties would be compelled or required to support that steadily aging platform.
When you combine the fact that not even Ubuntu developers really support the LTS (9/10 of the developers flock to the newest release, and the bug reports towards LTS get generally ignored - the LTS tagged bug queues are graveyards), I can not see the whole point of making LTS version available in the first place.
That being said, 7 months is a bit small window of support for a specific platform component. I would understand not supporting 1-2 years old kernel/glibc/whatever, but 7 months is really not enough.
Well it's tricky, MSFT actually ties certain vendors to support their OS as long as it's under support. For example if you want to participate in the WHQL program you have to have a version for each supported MSFT OS.
Chrome is still supported on Windows XP, so is FF, on Windows vendors not only do not seem to drop support but actually extend beyond MSFT's requirements.
While canonical is surely not MSFT but when you make an LTS program you either have to get 3rd party vendors on board, or manage and update the packages yourself to make sure they will be compatible with your own software, or to make updates to your LTS distro to keep it compatible with the newer packages.
While the OS is quite important, it's usually not the piece of software neither end users nor corporate users care about, for them it's just a platform to run the software they actually use. And if the platform loses support for a major piece of software after less than a year you can't blame anyone besides the maintainer of that platform.
The Linux community really needs to get their shit together, with every step forward these past few years they've seen to be taking 2 steps back.
With PAAS becoming more and more popular, it really should only take Apple to release a general server OS (no OSX Server doesn't count) to push it back completely into the realm of BBS hobbyists these days.
When you combine the fact that not even Ubuntu developers really support the LTS (9/10 of the developers flock to the newest release, and the bug reports towards LTS get generally ignored - the LTS tagged bug queues are graveyards), I can not see the whole point of making LTS version available in the first place.
That being said, 7 months is a bit small window of support for a specific platform component. I would understand not supporting 1-2 years old kernel/glibc/whatever, but 7 months is really not enough.