the last two games from bethesda i played both had playability issues that were both, at least for me, solved by graphics driver upgrades.

Brink, where the drivers to make the game playable came much too late [so late the game is dead], and Rage, where for some of us the issue has been solved much sooner.

Is there a lack of communication between Developer and GPU Manufacturers here?

Its not just a lack of communication, but the nature of the beast. Consoles have no operating systems or other programs running on them and they all have the exact same hardware. With the PC they have to make the drivers compatible with an almost infinite variety of hardware and programs. There's just no way to do all of that ahead of time so at some point they just have to release the game and see what problems crop up. Thankfully steam automatically sends them the information they need to figure out the problems and automatically updates everyone's game.