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The thing is: those guys exist at every position.  I think a lot of the reason that so many catchers develop that way is that teams put a premium on major league experience at the position in a way they don't for any other spot on the diamond.  Teams will live with a Rob Johnson if they don't have an obviously better option because he keeps the pitching staff happy.  Call it the Crash Davis syndrome, but for whatever reason fans and teams love blue-collar nice guys behind the plate, whether or not they can hit.  You see this happen all the time.  Pat Borders swung a candy cane at the plate and had a job into his 40's.
Catchers keep getting repeat shots while similar players at 1B get continually overlooked, and some of those guys figure out the whole offense thing in their late 20's/early 30's.  Teams are finally starting to take a more serious second look at the David Ortiz's, Carlos Penas, Russ Branyans, and Jack Custs of the world, but in previous decades those players only got one shot.
If teams valued intangibles from first basemen the way they do from catchers, the list of guys who could have taken the same development path and put up multiple monster seasons from 1B would be at least as long as the list at catcher (Roberto Petagine and Cal Pickering immediately come to mind as guys who would have put up star-type numbers for a few seasons if they'd gotten a shot in addition to the guys I mentioned who actually made the leap). 
I don't think there's anything specific about the catcher position that makes it take longer for players to develop offensively, but I'm open to an argument that there is.