.49 is occasionally mentioned on the list, because people use it. That is one of the nice things about Open Source projects, you can use development / testing versions if you are willing to deal with the occasional bug (I have withheld myself because I am still learning the full capabilities of .48, and I have heard .49 is sufficiently different). When people ask about a feature or bug, sometimes one of the developers will say that there is a fix / addition in the codebase that will be released when .49 is. So there has not been nothing about 'what it would do'.
I too would be interested to see a timeline of expected release, but I trust from the occasional mentions of it on the list that it is proceeding basically as planned. I am sure there is even more discussion on the developer list.
-Arlo James Barnes