Omar attended a MMS pre-conference session with some nice info on the System Center timeline:
At MMS 2007 a forecast was given about the development of the System Center family components. We can expect a SP 1 for SCCM 2007 around the second half of 2008, which will include a single detection agent for hardware updates that are currently being deployed with ITxU. This will also be the timeline for the Virtual Machine Manager.