The defacto standard workflow in CS academia is still to produce a dvi file from latex sources and then generate postscript from it. I think you will remember that unlike postscript, pdf became open only in 2008. You can of course generate pdf directly using pdflatex, unfortunately it doesnt work with another defacto standard for vector graphics "eps".
What I find unusual is that acrobat-reader and some other pdf viewers do not attempt to display postscript. A big part of pdf is really postscript underneath, a pdf viewer already knows how to display a large subset of postscript.
