Certainly something better will come out in a 3 year time frame.

I don't think that this is necessarily true. I think that any follow-up competition to the Empeg may have new, extra cool features, but what we have is a feature set that will likely never be duplicated and improved upon. Though there are some features I can take or leave (which I think is true of all of us because of the sheer number of abilities this device hase), the ones I use all the time and would really regret giving up are:

-Pull out + RCA jacks so it is my ONLY music listening device.
-Nested (as well as flexible) playlists.
-High quality hardware.
-High quality software.
-Volume adjust (with Hijack)
-Static volume on startup (with Hijack)
-Bookmarking

The truth is that not all of these items are going to interest the general public, but I wouldn't want to give them up for anything else. While I'd like a more readable display, I'd have a hard time giving up the feature set I'm used to in order to get it. As for a color display and all of the other things coming down the line, I could honestly care less about most of them, though I’m sure they’ll be necessary to get the general public on board.