Stumbled across this today ...

iWork

What is really needed is a Publisher replacement on a MaC. This could be done really well by Apple and could actually be a better product than Publisher itself. In 2008 Numbers was added to iWork, so a new program may be added to the suite later - and 2010 would be a good year considering last year's updates were rather, well, boring.

iLife

The suite already went through major upgrades last year and it may not even get an update this year - if it does and Blu-ray support is added then this is a very strong sign that Blu-ray will be coming to the Mac.

Read the rest here ...
MePipe: What will be in iLife 2010 and iWork 2010? (http://www.mepipe.com/2009/11/what-will-be-in-ilife-2010-and-iwork.html)

More predictions here ...
Predicting 2010: iLife, iWork & iTunes (http://theappleblog.com/2009/12/07/predicting-2010-ilife-iwork-itunes/)

I'm not so sure Apple needs to create a Publisher clone... With iWork '09, Apple split Pages into two kinds of layouts - Word Processing and Layout. Layout being similar to what Publisher does.

Is it exactly the same? Not at all. But I have never yearned for Publisher... I think Apple just needs to make a few more templates across the board.

They could add geometric shapes to 'Pages'. Just a teacher's view ... nothing in there for tinkering with Geometry units. You have to create them yourself.

I'm pretty happy with Pages. I like the Layout and Word Processing styles and think both work well.

The only thing I want to see is seamless support for Word documents. I know, I know; I can export natively to Word. What I want is to be able to open, modify and save Word documents without the need to always select Export or Save As and change the format type. It has support for Word, why not take it one step further and just let me work in that file type all the time?

Numbers needs the most work. It came a long way with the last version but it is still not as powerful as Excel. I would like the improvements so I could walk away from Office completely.

What I would like to see

iDVD - Support for the new digital movies with extras, and even iTunes LP's

iMovie - OpenCL support for speed, especially with encoding

iPhoto - Improvements with face recognition, OpenCL for speed also. Better search and taging of photots.

I could also see added functionality is there is something specifically when it comes to the Tablet.

I know iTunes really isn't part of iLife anymore, but man it could use some serious optimization. It's become way too bloated.