The Iron Man armor not getting an upgrade would kind of be like Reed Richards deciding to not invent things. The Iron Man armor will always recieve some odd end upgrade that falls along these lines. It's not like he's off harnessing the power cosmic now.
Recently, with Extremis, which should enhance his strength all sorts, and let him breathe fire or whatever, it gave him a super tech upgrade which made him some form of technopath (similar to Cable), up to the point he can hack into closed circuit things with ease, and bust through brick walls. The armor itself benefits, because of his physical upgrade, and can move faster, and use his brain as a processor for extremely lightning fast responses. Before, he had some form of psychotech to allow his brain to contact his armor and move it like a second skin, so it's not really new. It's kind of like upgrading your computer. It did everything fine before, it just does it better now.
He's still basic flight, self controlled armor, alarm systems, repulsor systems, laser systems, radar systems (I haven't seen pulse bolts in this one yet, but I doubt they're not in there.) Just with the upgrade that he can easily control other technological junk like his other armors, or split his attention ten ways from Sunday. The only upgrade that felt rushed (though was probably inevitable), was the "Spider Sense" upgrade, which his personal neural net employs to basically use the same frequency function as Spider Man's own. While he's powerful like this, true, he's definitely no match for some of the stronger people like Thor or Hercules or his own Sentry. Definitely when the Hulk comes back, he'll actually require the ploy of a specialty armor (like that Argonaut that was basically destroying the Avengers via Tony's subconciousness.) So basically, the Hulk could stomp him (if Tony drops like every one of these upgrades and just decides to be slow) otherwise, Tony will probably just pose to piss him off, because really, none of his weapons have really hurt the Hulk outside of his specialty things.
Yeah, he's recieved a super mega upgrade lately, but I doubt anybody would place him top ten most power on Earth with any sort of ease. Even with those sonics.
To answer the original question, no, he doesn't just get an upgrade necessary to the situation. At least fifteen times he's been caught with his pants down during CW alone with his armor getting shut down for every which reason that may exist. (Though it was hilarious it took him like ten seconds to reboot his armor the first time, and couldn't reboot it at all the second time.)
