I suspect that, aside from “ready real soon now” being distinct from “ready”; it’s because cloning doesn’t actually solve as many of the problems of someone with a still-extant(if only barely) species:
Without vastly greater knowledge, of the sort that definitely isn’t almost ready for prime time, cloning obviously isn’t going to increase genetic diversity in a population getting dangerously close to all reproduction being obligate incest(might be handy as an alternative to shipping live animals or gametes for artificial insemination between zoos, since you could fabricate an animal to be on site wherever the breeding plan requires it; but you can’t beat your actual supply of diversity).
It also does nothing(but risks being sold as a whiz-bang solution by people uninterested in the boring solutions; rather like ‘geoengineering’ in climate change contexts) to solve any of the problems that drive a species to the edge of extinction in the first place: habit loss, death by human or introduced predator, etc.
If it does work reasonably well; it would presumably allow you to maintain a captive population more or less indefinitely if your resources allowed(even if you have already dipped below minimum viable population territory, since you can stamp out copies of the ones you have even if any offspring are likely genetically unviable); but that does nothing about the environmental degradation that got you there in the first place; not does it much help you in retaining a viable species, rather than a laboratory curiosity.
It’s much more attractive, by comparison, to those involved with an already extinct species, since no amount of conventional conservation can de-extinct them; but this might(albeit straight into a small, critically endangered population that will probably require everything team conservation can manage if it ever wants to leave the lab.)
