I can't follow those long update threads but just read tidbits. One person had a great post speculating that google will now be doing rolling updates. I'm really looking forward to this. While the pagerank thing has it's obvious benefits, the many iterations required to calculate PR causes this massive monthly update with rankings affected. In the meantime, the deepbot has spidered lots of sites that could be readily added to the index but have to wait for a silly PR update. I suppose this is where the freshbot came in to get some fresher content into google.
From speculation and reading the update thread and GGs comments, perhaps google decided to add the deepbot data into the index right away from now on and either stick the results at the back of the SERPS or assign a temporary PR to the page based on the domain name (only a guess).
So what are the ramifications for a rolling update? How often would PR be recalculated? Are folks looking forward to this or more worried about upsetting a system they have "figured out" and got used to?