I think the guys at google finally realized that their "as little manual intervention as possible" policy isn't working well short term. With a longer periods between pagerank/backlink updates, they win some valuable time to improve the algo.
I expect some big changes soon, too many articles about spam in google and the competitors grow stronger, yahoo has it's own crawler, msn seems to be preparing for something big (the bot activity is crazy)...
I hate sitting and watching, but atm I don't see any hints to what they could come up with...
