I know there is at least one person from apple here, so Im hoping someone has the inside track.

any word on:
-true VBR
-gapless playback
-more custom options in iTunes (ie setting dir for saving songs)
-multiple artist tags for songs with multiple artists
-multiple user rating tags (for shared libraries)

Well, the solution to this is not to share a library. If you're working on any recent Windows machine (2000, XP), set up multiple user accounts. Then each user will have all his own settings and so forth as per windows, but will also have a separate iTunes library. They can share the same song files, but have different ratings and such.

Multiple user accounts is just a good idea anyway.

Maybe in your opinion, but I hate the welcome screen. Thats why my computer just boots to windows. We have no need for multiple user accounts (other then this -and this is not enough). Having a feature where each user is able to store a rating in a tag would be great and open up other option - ie average rating for groups - so if multiple ppl want to listen you could select the users that are listening and it would avg their ratings on the songs so that songs the group wants to hear would be played more often.