Is it true that hardware companies develop their products...

Time to market is pretty short for hardware. We don’t see too many revolutionary advances any more, just incremental changes that don’t require much in the way of retooling. You can find a history of the Pentium IV processor here.

This is typical; Intel releases a new CPU every 6 months or so on average.

To a point, yes. Research is an ongoing process for hardware companies. Where a tech may not be mass-produceable yet, the research has to come from somewhere. Flash storage, for instance, had been researched for some time before it was used in any meaningful way.

Manufacturing of a finished product – say, a computer – happens much faster, though. As said above, most computer manufacturers only perform minor bumps with most upgrades. This is not to say that computers are internally road mapped years ahead of time.

Burgeoning technologies in the eyes of the consumer are very different from burgeoning technologies in the eyes of the developer. Where the developer sees the new tech as it is conceived, the consumer sees the technology through products that can utilize the new tech at affordable prices through economies of scale.