Bob Swart has a report covering what Nick Hodges said at a conference in Holland, earlier this week. According to the report, some of the priorities in the Delphi roadmap are going to shift. In particular, the support for Unicode in the VCL seems to have been anticipated to the end of 2007, while the CF support in the VCL (that is the availability of .NET Compact Framework visual designers) will slip.
This blog post has started some discussions in the non-technical group, as expected. Specifically, the consideration that Unicode support might mean the end of Win95/98 support has spurred quite some controversy. While nothing technically prevents supporting Unicode on Win9x, this certainly requires some extra effort CodeGear might not be willing to endure. This is understandable. What is relevant, is it seems CodeGear is hearing what its customers are asking and the Delphi survey is being taken seriously. This is very good news.
I hope a new official roadmap will be published soon, even if as a work in progress.