As I have already mentioned, even in its How and When To Deprecate APIs, nothing is being said about a policy regarding actually removing the deprecated APIs...
The number of applications based on older JVM (1.4 for instance) is still important, in part due to application servers which take a long time to validate themselves with new versions of JVM...
The sheer number of applications which are actually running in production means this “backward compatibility” policy may not be broken anytime soon.