Or at least *my* big question:

Who's going to be responsible for the overall engineering for future units, S3 or Empeg?

Or to put it more specifically, if S3 wants to make the Mk3 unit a totally closed and proprietary unit that runs Windows CE, will any ex-empegers have anything to say about it or is that Just The Way It Will Be?

I personally really enjoy the hackability of the empeg because of its embedded Linux OS. It makes the hardware less "a dedicated car mp3 player" and more like "A cool tiny little computer to play with and hack on that also happens to be a killer car/home MP3 player." Yeah, I'll still have my Mk2, but when the Mk3 comes out with the 160BG harddrive standard, firewire, PCMCIA slots, wireless ethernet and the holographic projection display, I'd like to be able to bang around on it just like I do with my Mk2.

A lot of people I know are saying "S3 are really cool and they're about the best company to have done something like this" but it's still, IMHO, "a few guys in their garage building a really cool piece of hardware being acquired by International Megacorp" and that usually scares me.