I hope to see voice recognition for most items including texting and emails and global searches for all user data (like contacts, emails, calendar entries, music files, photos, applications, etc.) We probably will not see it, but I hope to find multi-touch enabled for all Android devices.
I also hope for enhancements to the Gmail app including better display of inline images and PDFs. Adobe Flash?
If it really is just version 1.6, then I suspect Clackamas is correct and it will mostly be cosmetic updates. Sigh...