I see both good and bad in that speech. It is very good that Microsoft is not waiting for Longhorn to release IE 7. I would love to see IE on par with Mozilla or surpass it in terms of features and security. The down side of what was said appears to be that IE 7 is not for Pre-WinXP. How could Microsoft be listening to their Win2000 customers or even just the major customers let alone be committed to security and not roll out IE 7 for that OS??!? I understand the need for Microsoft to work on SP2 right now but I still would very much like to see Win2000 SP5 and IE 7 for Pre-WinXP. My biggest fear with this issue is that Win2000 or previous OS's in terms of IE 7 will get lost in the shuffle between WinXP SP2 and Longhorn. But like everything else, we will have to wait and see.
I guess it won't matter in a few weeks, as I should be upgrading to WinXP. I still plan on using Win2000 for a duel boot or on a second computer however so it's something I want to keep an eye on.