Airport Express NEEDS a modem jack! I'd love that portability, but 90% of the places I travel don't have broadband. They ALL have phone jacks. For mobility, you can't rely on Ethernet alone.
And Airports with modems NEED V.92 already! Otherwise you miss calls... and so does the person who is loaning you their phone line! Their callers don't even get a busy signal. Not good. Modem-on-hold and call notification is old news. I love it on my PowerBook, and so do the people I visit and check my mail without losing their incoming calls. So bring it to AirPort already.
I'm done 🙂
As for iBooks... it would be weird to change the case twice in a row, so maybe if there are new iBooks soon, that means the Intel ones next year will use the same basic casing, even though a new CPU chip generally means a new case.
Which isn't all that odd in a way: keeping the shell adds a sense of stability to a transition that makes some buyers nervous.
And the G3 tower case was re-used for the G4 towers, after all, just cosmetically changed.