Adoption of View/Controller Separation

[T]he MVC approach did two separations. The most important separation was Separated Presentation - separating the model from the view/controller. The other separation, that of the view and controller, was not popular in rich client GUI frameworks, although it did have a resurgance with web based user interfaces. In MVC the view was a simple display of information in the model and the controller handled the various user input events. This doesn't work well with most GUI frameworks because they are designed so that the UI controls both display and receive the user input events.

 http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/OrganizingPresentations.html