Durring the last couple of user group meetings the very real question of...

"What does Joomla! 1.6 look like and when does it get released"

... has  been posed.  I have done a little bit of research on this and I have put together a couple of resources below for those folks interested in knowing about the forthcoming developments of Joomla! 1.6

 What will it look like?

There are a few major changes happening to Joomla!'s ACL (access control levels), that is how you control what people are allowed to do and see on the site.  This is a major change that a host of existing plugins and components are currently trying to deal with and I imagine a bunch of current components will become obsolete over night for new projects and many new horizons of development will be opened up.

Check out this video tour by Amy Stephen of the Joomla! Development Team.

When will it get released?

http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_1.6_Development_Status

The short and smarmy answer I have found on the forums is "when it is done!", here is a forum thread with some decent information.  I have not seen anything committing to a particular release schedule.  Hey, this is open source community development not corporate software, insert winking smiley here.

Here is the developers Google Group

So, if you really want to know, these are the places to look and ask questions.