Here's my take on it:
At the end of The Incredible Hulk, Tony Stark tracked down Gen. Ross and said (implied?) that they (Fury, SHIELD) wanted the Hulk for the team they were assembling. The clear implication was that Stark and SHIELD would help track Banner down, which would get Ross off the hook for the havoc he had caused with his ill-advised attempt to recreate the Super Soldier serum.
However, Marvel later decided to deviate from that approach. Since they were not planning a sequel to TIH, there was no reason to have Ross involved with recruiting Banner for the Avenger Initiative. Thus they needed to bridge that gap in the continuity by explaining away Ross's absence from the planning for the team in the later movies. They very cleverly covered the lapse in The Consultant, where it was explained that Stark wasn't talking to Ross about recruiting Banner at all, but about getting Emil Blonsky/Abomination released into SHIELD custody for use on the team.
Fury didn't want Blonsky on the team, despite the WSC pushing for him, so Agent Coulson sent Stark to talk to Ross, knowing that the billionaire would piss the general off so badly that he'd refuse to release the Abomination. That neatly explained why Ross wasn't involved in bringing in the Hulk.
We won't even get into the discrepancies between what Fury told Stark about the Avenger Initiative in Iron Man 2 and how the team was eventually assembled. The writers seemed to keep changing their minds about whether or not there even was an Initiative and whether Fury wanted Tony to be a part of it.