Where Have All the Book Editors Gone?

I came across a Stuart Evers blog entry in the Guardian about the new role of editors at book publishers:

These days, experience of shaping, honing and bringing out the best in an author is unnecessary to land a high profile role: all you need to be able to do is identify the product.

It's a sad observation, but has a lot of truth. I know editors who get frustrated with the entire process because they don't get to edit. All they can do is hope that the book comes in well enough constructed that they can free up some time for the market analyses and major manuscript resuscitations that are necessary. So here's my question: if editors don't get time to really edit and the authors have to do a lot of the marketing, then what is it that publishers really do?