Does anyone think the refresh will include a mini-displayport in on any models smaller than the 27"... That's literally the only reason I am considering that sheer monstrous beast of a screen... 27" led for PS3 whilst multitasking to rip DVDs using Handbrake in super time >> sounds awesome, but a 21 (or 24!) option would be more sensible.
Someone mentioned above, the significant speed increase an iCore would have over C2D when using handbrake... what sort of percentage increases are we talking about here?
3X faster according to gizmodo tests:

Full tests here:
http://gizmodo.com/5407204/
More benchmarks:
http://everythingapple.blogspot.com/2009/11/core-i7-imac-benchmarks-and-first.html
Compute intensive applications are hugely improved now. The extra efficiency per core and extra cores are very welcome with video encoding for example. My Core i7 is more than three times as fast as my older Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz, for Handbrake H.264 encodes.
In this test I transcoded Chapter 7 of Spirited Away to H.264, from the computer's hard drive, and measured the total time to completion. At first I thought there might be something wrong with Handbrake 0.9.3 on Core i7, as I was getting speeds slower than my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Then I realized it was because I had mistakenly installed the PowerPC version of Handbrake on my iMac. Yet even running under Rosetta, the speed of Handbrake was not terrible. The Intel version was however nearly 5X as fast, with the iMac 3.5X as fast as my MacBook Pro. It took just 2 minutes and 7 seconds to encode that 10 minute chapter using the default 2-pass x264 encoding settings. In other words, the iMac Core i7 can encode at nearly real-time speed under Rosetta, and nearly 5X real-time using native (32-bit) code.