Froogle replacement discovered
Well, Google hasn't announced anything yet, but I decided to do some investigating myself to see what I could find. I found exactly what I was looking for -- so my answer to Iana is: "right here". The inclusion of "/base/s2" in the robots.txt soon after Google's announcement led me directly to the coming product.
The new search tool has two new result formats to choose from -- grid and map -- but personally I'm not in love with either of them. They all seem disorganized to me.
If this is supposed to be used to search for products, I'm confused about the inclusion of things like MySpace pages that don't sell anything. Searching for "iPod" is completely useless if you are looking to purchase one.
With that said, I am sure it's still being worked on, so I'm not going to give it a thumbs up or down until it is officially launched.