Having always been an early adopter of Nokia products, N80, N86, N95, I've found that usually within 4-6 months of release the original model has been rereleased with better/different spec's.
Has anyone heard if this is likely to happen with the N97?
Fairly sure of it. Admittedly it happens with all phone companies (and all technology!) but it does seem Nokia like to release a product that "does everything", to find that actually it doesn't quite do everything as fully as everyone thought, and then a new model (N97i ?) comes along with all those things that everyone wanted originally.
Same happened with the N80/N80i, that was sold as being an internet phone able to do all sorts of internet things... launched with a few limited aspects to it, and then the "i" version came out with all of those things enabled - all of which seemed (from what I remember) to be software related. Yes there were firmware updates and yes some of the features did get introduced to the N80, but a lot seemed to only be for N80i customers. Feels very like you're buying a pre-release version of something, giving the company a few months worth of feedback and feature upgrades, and then them launching a new device with all those things "fixed" and probably at a much cheaper price. I'd hope they can introduce things to the N97 without doing that, but I feel the business model of Nokia as with any other company requires them to try and claw back their costs from selling new models rather than just giving existing customers lots of new features. Still, it's early days...
Inevitably new stuff comes along.
With the N97 Nokia have heavily pushed the fact they will be doing significant software upgrades. AFAIK there are three of these planned. It's likely that Skype (and SIP) will part of the first update for example, but I understand we may also see upgrades of the core applications in future updates.