Wow, Microsoft is really on a roll here these past couple weeks. First, IE8 is officially announced here on the IE Blog and then PeteL, a member of the IE team, announced he's already uploaded the VPCs and is just waiting for them to propagate to all of Microsoft's content servers. So, I guess we should expect to have a shiny new toy to play with starting some time tomorrow.
Please, for the web's sake, let alone Microsoft's poor IE team who is taking a public flogging, let this version put an end to all the missing standards. I don't care so much about proprietary things like supporting Canvas, because that can be provided through an abstraction to the VML engine or Silverlight or Flash, but please let this be the version that finally brings the DOM and CSS support up to spec and provides a better performing ECMAScript engine.
Fingers crossed, but I refuse to hold my breath. :)
Update:
It's possible this is a false alarm. Joe pointed out to me in the comments that PeteL was probably talking about IE6/7 VPCs in the same post that he mentioned IE8. Without having read his previous post I had no context to figure that out and he wasn't exactly very clear in his context switch. My apologies in advance if I got anyone's hopes up too soon if it turns out to not be IE8. :(