As far as I know Visual Studio 2010 can connect to TFS 2012 for development activities, but cannot directly create team projects for 2012. In fact, many administrative tasks (create Team Projects, build definitions, etc) in 2012 don't work from a 2010-based Team Explorer.
The solution is to upgrade to VS2012 or later, or to install Team Explorer 2012 to create team projects while continuing to use VS2010 for development.
Sadly Microsoft doesn't really declare this anywhere so it can be hard to find the answer.
See also: Can't create Team project in tfs 2012 using visual studio 2010