They only said the Mini is still important part of their line up. So it is not dead.
Some of us do not want to plug in some devise that draws 900 watts as the older Pros do.
Spec wise it is dead, they made it impossible to update memory and it is no walk in the park to change a hard drive either. I have an i7 core 4 Mini and it runs pretty well especially if you use an SSD, the newer ones are dogs in comparison. If you need one get the older ones they are a much better value.
One of the advantages of that 900 Watt power supply on the older Mac Pro is that it could drive and POWER eight 30 inch HD monitors without batting an eye, while doing live rendering light ray tracing to each of them of a different animation scene. Of course that power supply alone would set you back around $600 if one were to try and build an equivalent PC at the time. I priced that out. A lot of critics were claiming they could build an equal system with a $40 P/S.