I highly doubt they will EVER make it free. A $600 program doesn't just automaticly go free.. from the original vendor, that is. Plus, if it went free, imagine how pissed off all those people out there that actually paid for it would be? Lol.
I'd like for there to be more Filters which are actually USEFUL - instead of the rather pathetic selection we have now, with half of them never getting used.
I hope it runs faster, there will be more layer modes, and the filter adjustment layers like black_dude said
Building illistrator within it would be nice(or some of the illistrator features) that would be cool but the rpcie would go up
Erm. All the filters are very useable for proffesional proper designers. Photoshop wasn't designed for people who make sigs by the way
On a intel 3.2ghz HT with 1gig of ram its really smooth, if you put really complex filters on high quality large images it will make anything go slow, my computer took 10 seconds less than a power mac G5 with two dual core G5's at 2.5ghz and 15gig of ram to apply a filter to a high-ish quality image. I think its more your computer than photoshop.