The SharePoint Team blog has another entry today: Configure it out

Read the post carefully and you can discover additional details about the next version. My favorite -- "simultaneous vanilla LDAP & Windows auth (on separate URL namespaces, both hosting the same base content)."

I knew that non-Active Directory authentication was coming, but this is huge! Employees authenticated via AD, external users authenticated in a different fashion. If the external connector license is reasonable, SharePoint deployments should grow dramatically. (As if they weren't already!)