Jonathan: Plugins, yes, but the component concept is new. Have a look at the "General routines" section of Arvind's post for an idea of the difference involved. That example actually argues against the 6month point; it directly enables faster development of much more involved modifications to the app. It approaches the magically generated admin panels of things like Django.
The Community Pack recently offered to MTEnterprise customers is going to be one of the first such applications. MTEnterprise as a separate distribution is also going to disappear and become a Pack applied to MT4. Another one has already been named that I can never recall. Those should be available either at release or shortly after. There are several plugins extant that are perfect for this integration, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least a couple of those devs have them ready for the release date.
As for the open version, my understanding from a conference call yesterday was that the precise details of MTOS(as referred to) haven't been decided, and that determining them will itself be part of the community project. That necessarily requires MT4(the commercial product) settle down some more. Just about anything you may have read anyplace other than the MT site contains rather large amounts of speculation if not fabrication, which is why I'm limiting my comments on it. It's interesting and important to note that the actual MT dev community, as opposed to the various bloggery pundits and random users, have been relatively mum on MTOS. There's a reason for that: we just don't know much yet. The call in question should be available soon via Odeo, incidentally.
My impression so far is that MTOS as a framework shouldn't be crippled in any way and would hence have a direct upgrade path into MT4, though it might not ship with everything available to the commercial(cf. Expression Engine Core). During the call, a question was actually raised regarding someone independently replicating the functionality of say, the Enterprise Pack. The response was basically, "Go for it." On the other side of the limited functionality point, I foresee the possibility of MTOS offering experimental stuff ahead of the commercial version.
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