Caveat: I have no insider knowledge of empeg product plans, just an active imagination.
The empeg guys have been suggesting that the new product to be announced will be some kind of home audio component, perhaps intending to compete with AudioRequest. One might hypothesize that the new home audio component and the existing car stereo component can work together, eliminating the need for a PC to rip your tunes. It's not much of a stretch to imagine this new box having an Ethernet jack and connecting to some external music service provider (e.g., mp3.com, emusic.com) to grab tunes for you (at some nominal fee, of course).
The MP3.com guys touted this whole music service provider vision at great length at the last MP3 Summit.
Odds are, the hypothetical home component and the real car component share substantial amounts of code, and they're trying to coordinate the release schedules, dividing the developers' time and delaying the release of 1.1.