What happened to Pivot Table view in Access 2013?

"maintaining both seems wasteful"

similar to now having to develop/maintain our applications in MS Access with the related pivot tables/forms in MS Excel? MS just moved the burden to the users instead of the Microsoft developers, I guess. very disappointing!

You can see that we, the Access development community are disappointed and getting very nervous.  There appears to be no future for Access and that makes me very nervous.

I had to comment on this. Mark, Access is not and has never been designed for the developer community. It is being targeted towards the Knowledge Worker. That Access has proven to be a tool for developers has knocked MS for a loop. They want developers to use Visual Studio.

Also, a new version doesn't necessarily mean improved in every feature. The fact is that Pivot tables are not easily understood by the knowledge worker. And while developers have made great use of them to make attractive apps for end users, developers are not the target market. So, resources have been diverted to other enhancements and some features have been deprecated. 

It is not that difficult, to automate opening an Excel sheet from Access to use Pivots there.

Unofficially, the answer is simple. It is a way of extracting more money from customers.

That actually makes no sense. Most people buy Access as a part of Office Pro. So they already have Excel. If anything this might decrease revenue as more people might skip Pro and go with Standard.

Nicely put Algis. I couldn't agree more. There's a market and a huge opportunity that Microsoft is not seeing of and sooner or later someone else will.