After the one-two punch of announcements of iPhone availability in the U.K. and Germany last week, every Apple enthusiast fully expected Steve Jobs to make a public announcement at this week’s Apple Expo in Paris of a deal with French cellphone provider Orange. He did not.

It’s crazy. Last Friday Didier Lombard, chief executive of France Télécom (which owns Orange) told a reporter a trade show in Vietnam that Orange had made a deal with Apple, which many media outlets reported. But Apple never said a word.

The Apple Expo was a perfect setting for such an announcement – it’s France’s version of Macworld San Francisco and draws tens of thousands of people. The event runs through tomorrow, but Apple has nothing on the schedule relating to the iPhone. The devices aren’t even on display at Apple’s booth in the exhibit hall.

This curiosity has touched off all sorts of speculation, from Apple holding a grudge over last year’s iPod law requiring iTunes downloads to be “interoperable” with competing devices to questions about the health of Steve Jobs. Some think Jobs is punishing Lombard for speaking out of turn. He has a history of getting very ticked at partners who announce cooperative ventures before Apple is ready (see graphics board maker ATI’s July 2000 gaffe).

The explanation probably is nothing so dramatic – in all likelihood details of the deal are still being worked out – but for Apple to let such an obvious PR opportunity slip by is completely out of character. You’d think that Jobs would have made sure the ink was dry on all three European deals before he hopped on that plane to London.

Then again, perhaps the two parties have reached an agreement but Jobs wanted to wait a few weeks before announcing it in order to gin up more free publicity for the iPhone after the current chatter has died down.

With Apple, you never know.

UPDATE: Mystery solved. The French magazine Challenges has reported that the Apple-Orange deal is hung up on the size of the commission payments that the cellphone operator would pay Apple. The magazine says Apple wants more than one third of each subscription fee. If the two companies can't resolve their differences by next week, Orange may not be selling the iPhone before Christmas.