In reply to:

At least Firewire or IEEE 1394 is an open standard and not subject to royalty fees.



Actually, for a very long time it was both an industry standard AND subject to royalty fees. Apple charged $1 per socket if memory serves, but has since released it to IEEE free of royalty, I believe.

In reply to:

But to become the industry standard is yet to be seen, I personally would rather see ethernet become the standard, because then we can truly network our entire stereo and computer systems together, much like Onkyo and a few others are beginning to do.



Nope. It's official. IEEE 1394 will indeed be the standard interface for DVD-Audio, in additin to 6 channel PCM I assume:
http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/1202/13.firewire.shtml

Much to my dismay. I have a $2.1k Denon receiver and a $1.1k DVD player that both lack IEEE 1394 connections. I'm sure 6 channel PCM will be more than sufficient though and I'm willing to bet we'll have a crap load of IEEE1394 connections on receivers by the time I'm willing to dump my new 4802.

As to the networking, like you said, IEEE 1394 can do this as well, and it can do this at far higher speeds than current incarnations. Apple's already unveiled the first device (to my knowledge) with 1394b (800MB/s) - the new Powerbook. It also has higher noise immunity than ethernet and it has no limitations to its networking capabilities. It already supports full TCP/IP:
http://developer.apple.com/firewire/IP_over_FireWire.html

Should be interesting. You can get more info here: http://www.1394ta.org/

As to whether or not IEEE 1394 will offer any advantage over PCM besides the number of cables, I think that will depend on your hardware. I don't think it's being positioned as a higher quality connection for the consumer as much as a design consideration for the engineer. It could allow people to buy lower end DVD players without high quality decoders, putting the brunt of their investment into their receiver (as is often the case with DVD video). They wouldn't need a DVD player with high quality DACs and the like which significantly reduces cost. If your DVD-A player has a good decoder and good DACs, I would assume the difference between 6 channel PCM and 1394 would be negligeable, but we won't know until good data becomes a bit more accessible.

Regards,
Semi

Edit: Axiom seriously needs to invest in a better BBS software.