Little hope for an immediate one...

I can wait. I don't really WANT a 'me too' Yamaha copy. I don't honestly see Roland with anything groundbreaking on the WS front, either... nice integration with the DAW side, I guess, but nothing really earth shattering as a performance instrument. The new Brass ARX looks promising as a new technology, Maybe a trickle down V-Piano technology. But currently, there's not much that other Roland's do that I really think are new technology that we could use. And those two I mentioned, it is unlikely we'll see them in an arranger for quite a while...

Usually (in fact, SA technology is the first I can think of) most groundbreaking synth and sampling sound functions make an appearance in their WS cousins several years earlier than they make it to arrangers.

From what has happened to the initial promise of the Audya, it STILL seems we are going to have to wait for a more powerful CPU in a closed arranger before the promise of streaming multiple audio as a source for several of the arranger's tracks is a reality. That's probably the next big frontier. The trick, of course, will be that probably only the Big3 have the resources to actually make the huge library for us that we will need.

Plus there's always the chance that someone making an 'open' keyboard makes an arranger module for it that actually does what most of us need And THEN do VSTi's and live loops, too! Ease of use is still what drives this market, NOT the ultimate in flexibility, as tempting to the wonky geek in all of us it is

So, to cap it off, no pressing need for anything immediate. I doubt Roland COULD field something that will wow the jaded players. I think I'm going to wait until the Audya type system comes to full fruition, and happily gig my G70 until then. In the meantime, you can listen to the GW-8 and Prelude demos to see a good reason why Roland doesn't need to roll out a TOTL G-series for a while...