My thoughts on "new functionality": The Universal Shell that the 1000 has fits into the "universal reader with plugins" that they were promising for the iliad.But as they said they will not backport features, I think we can forget the plug-in based reader for the iliad.
OTOH, they say they have a patched Qemu with e-ink screen emulation; if that is open-source, it can be VERY interesting if it can be used inside the VMWare devel image for the iliad.
And finally, this explains why they were so slow releasing new firmwares for the iliad: they were frenetically coding the new app stack for the 1000.In fact, I'm surprised that they managed to release some firmware updates at all. After all, they have upgraded the delta chip, rewritten the shell from scratch, ported a webkit-based browser... and it's very probable they've have changed also the Java VM for Mobipocket (which will have made them rewrite some parts of it too).
Anyway, the universal reader framework has advantages (scribble support, consistent UI), but one very crude disadvantage: it's tailored to new apps, not to porting apps. Only those apps that have a well-defined rendering engine (i.e. poppler, webkit) will be easy to port to a framework like that..
Certainly I would love to know how to do the partial updates needed to implement scribbles ourselves (and I think that would be more useful than the universal reader with plug-ins)...
