Jailbreak your phone and you will have a wide choice of different notifications. Some show icons on the status bar, others like the one I use show icons with text on the lockscreen. You can even get voice announcements. Regardless of what Apple announces today it will still be behind what's available in the jailbroken universe. I was multitasking with IOS 3 and it was a much much better iteration than what Apple finally came out with.