Like any other Mac user I'm pretty excited about the news from Apple. Panther looks promising, the G5 should rock,
iChat AV is nice and works well but I think Apple is missing one big thing here: compatibility.
Like it or not, most of the world is using Windows, where the default conferencing application is NetMeeting. To be a truly succesful application I believe that iChat AV should be compatible with NetMeeting.
I do undestand that the high quality compression system is part of QuickTime, it would be okay to be able to have high quality videoconferencing only with other Mac users, but still, I'd like also to be able to have low quality jerky videoconferencing with NetMeeting.
I think that at Apple they are aware of this, and we are still at beta stage, and since they listened for Safari's tabbed browsing, they might still be listening.
PS: if you have downloaded iChat AV and want to try videoconferencing with me, I'm paolovalde on AIM.