for better or worse
My educated guess based on talking to a guy who knows a guy is that it'll be for better.
Remember Pro Tools TDM, when the argument for running plug-ins on dedicated Motorola DSP chips was... that they were dedicated? This is likely to be similar, only the economy of scale will come into play.
As I said, no computer company has ever come out with new models that are less powerful than the ones that preceded them.
(I know, there was a Mac Mini, etc., but you get the point.)