Apple Thoughts: 1080p on the New Apple TV

"One rather mystifying omission from the new AppleTV's feature set is the fact that it does not seemingly have the ability to play 1080p video. That's a crock: hardwarewise, the new AppleTV is more than capable of 1080p, because the iPhone 3GS was capable of it, and it didn't even have an A4 CPU to draw upon. The second-gen ATV should be more than up for the task if that lesser platform could manage it."

And it apparently can play 1080p, but it downsamples the movie so the output is 720p. Any thoughts as to why they would do this?