Miss 4e D&D

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That's the actual explicit rule, too, incidentally.

Where is that specified? Neither my copy of the 4e PHB or the 4e Rules Compendium have any guidance about that.

EDIT: Since I'm questioning this, I should bring receipts. Here's where I'm looking:

Dungeon Master's Guide
In the 4e DMG, under Skill Challenges, there's a section called "Reward Clever Ideas". However, it's only about rolling unexpected skill choices:

In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. Instead, let them make a roll using the skill but at a hard DC, or make the skill good for only one success.

Even within these fairly narrow rules, it's generally a bad idea for a PC to use a skill outside what the DM expects, because it's likely to have a difficult DC, which is at minimum a +7 bonus to the DC over picking some moderate DC that the DM expected. Beyond that, the game doesn't mention shortcutting a success, or even shortcutting a skill challenge.

I believe the only place where the players circumvent any part of the SC in the DMG is in the first skill challenge example, a negotiation which gives an automatic failure if you try the Intimidation skill. No automatic successes of any kind seem to be noted.

Rules Compendium
In the expanded 4e Rules Compendium there's also a sidebar that's nearly a page long (digression: if it's this long, can you really call it a sidebar?) detailing "ways for the adventurers to gain an advantage of some kind." This also only applies to skill checks, by translating some rolls into different results. The entire list is just four ideas:

• A success against a hard DC counts as two successes: a success against both a hard DC and a moderate DC.
• A success against a hard DC removes a failure that has already been accumulated in the challenge, instead of counting as a success.
• A success against an easy DC counts as a success against a moderate DC.
• A success against a moderate DC counts as a success even though the adventurer making the check has already used the same skill to gain a success against a moderate DC.

Later on, it also mentions that players can suggest skills, but they should be treated as "secondary" (i.e. can only grant one success, or provide some secondary benefit to future rolls). Neither of these sections suggest granting automatic successes or failures, or circumventing the skill challenge.

In General
I'd suggest that this actually makes sense in the framework of 4e. A skill challenge is meant to replace a couple monsters when used in a combat, or replace a combat entirely at a high complexity. An automatic success in a 4e skill challenge is like one-shotting a level-appropriate (non-minion) monster in 4e combat: it's so much stronger than any other option, a player would be foolish not to go gunning for that option over and over. Circumventing an entire skill challenge is that magnified a dozenfold. The 4e designers wanted creativity, but only within the bounds of picking a skill and narrating how it gets used.

There's nothing wrong with circumventing this. If I'm running Cairn of the Winter King and one of the players want to skip that sail-rigging skill challenge by spending telekinetic lift, I'm gonna let 'em. But I don't believe the 4e designers actually want that to be part of their game. They paid some lip service to creativity, but at the end of the day they wanted everything funneled into skill checks.