Apple said Carbon was a fully supported framework because that's what their developers needed to hear in order to switch to OS X. In reality, even Adobe was smart enough to not use Carbon for any big new projects (Lightroom uses Cocoa on OS X). By the time Apple pulled the plug on 64-bit Carbon, it was clear that the only reasons for its continued existence were Microsoft Office and Adobe CS. Apple was well on their way to having a suitable replacement for Office, and their Pro Apps suite was missing only the hole that CS fills. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe was paying Apple to keep Carbon alive, and Adobe in particular was setting new records for unimportance to Apple because Apple was too busy taking over the consumer market with their Intel machines to really care much about pro tools. (Apple would have had to worry about Microsoft not following them to new APIs if not for the facts that Office doesn't need to go 64-bit, and Microsoft needs to keep Office on the Mac in order to prevent open file formats from catching on.) Adobe wouldn't let Carbon go quietly, so they forced Apple to play the bad guy in killing Carbon.

  > Apple was well on their way to having a suitable 
  > replacement for Office, and their Pro Apps suite was 
  > missing only the hole that CS fills. 

Apple Final Cut Pro is a carbon application, too. You need really good reason to rewrite large parts of a big applications.

When Apple has moved on to a new technology, support for the legacy technology has generally lasted about 5 years. If they wanted the more demanding apps off of it, it made sense to close the door to 64 bit. Apple has put considerable effort into optimizing the OS. It didn't make sense to do that for legacy support. Apple certainly does care about pro apps, and has done many things that can/do enhance apps developed for current technology.

Photoshop showcased the Mac as a performance platform for some time Previous to OS X. I think they played hardball with Apple, trying to bully them into using costly Display Postscript licensing for OS X, and lost.

At one point Adobe engineers would interviewed by MacWeek magazine and talked about development. Sometimes managers forced them to do Windows code first because they hated it so much. They described it as working in a sewer. The Mac was far more advanced below the surface of the OS. Color matching support evolved far earlier. Simple things like anti-aliasing an image when scaling it had to be reinvented in every Windows app, but it was an included service of the Mac OS. Clearly the engineers loved Apple even pre OS X. It's too bad that Adobe trying to strong-arm control of a key technology in OS X placed some distance between the companies. The Mac market and In retrospect Apple did the right thing avoiding the proprietary lock. Going with more open standards, and sharing some things they develop has been good for most of us. (except those wanting proprietary lock in)

The sad story is that Apple could deprecate Carbon all they want, but if Adobe, Microsoft, Quark and friends kept using it, Apple would need to oblige. Apple had no power, and these companies were basically "too big to fail" so to speak.

It's also not the first time Apple got bitten by this problem (although to be honest given the number of massive changes they carried in the last 10 years or so, they kind of were asking for it ^_^).