The situation outlined above will occur if the IP in question is a legacy IP that has been completely removed from the Vivado install. There are other IP that may not appear in the IP Catalog that do support the Upgrade option. This will happen if the IP is installed but hidden (The 2012.2 Vivado IP catalog requires new IP cores to be generated with the latest IP version).
If a customer has continually upgraded their IP cores to the latest version with each release (or upgraded all of their IP cores in ISE 14.1), this issue will not affect them.
If a user has created or upgraded IP cores in 13.x and now migrating their project to 2012.2/14.2 the following IP cores versions will show this issue:
13.2 Users with:
axi_interconnect 1.03a
13.3 Users with:
gig_eth_pcs_pma 11.1
tri_mode_eth_mac 5.1
Xaui 10.1
13.4 Users with:
tri_mode_eth_mac 5.2
Xaui 10.2
IP cores created in 12.x and earlier that have not been upgraded prior to PlanAhead tool 14.2 or Vivado Design Suite 2012.2 will be more likely to exhibit this behavior.
To work around the issue, open the IP core in CORE Generator 14.2 and upgrade before importing into a PlanAhead or Vivado project.
In Vivado 2012.3, the Upgrade command is available for all IP versions that support the Upgrade flow in CORE Generator.