I know this wouldn't be a new product category, but something I would love to see in the future (not too soon though, I just bought my 1070) would be a preamp or receiver with a USB2.0 or firewire input, like the RR2150, except for 5.1 (preferably 7.1, but maybe that isn't enough bandwidth?) channels, so that my computer would just see it as a sound card. As of now, there is absolutely no digital method of getting 5.1 from a PC to a receiver without re-encoding the audio into Dolby Digital or DTS. In other words, my computer would decode my WMA 5.1 or MP3 or FLAC files, which gives 5.1 channels of PCM type audio, from what I understand. Then, that PCM audio would just go directly to the receiver for multichannel playback. This would also allow for DVD-A and games to be played in surround at full quality, and would work in the future for HD-DVD and Blu-ray, since the computer would do all the decoding work. It would just be one digital connection from the PC to the receiver so that I can use the receiver's DACs instead, and so I could use one cable, etc. DTS/DD passthrough wouldn't be necessary either, since the PC would just decode the DTS or DD and use a digital stream directly from that, for no quality loss.

I guess in the future, HDMI will do what I want, but I don't really see any PC sound cards allowing for output through HDMI videocards anytime soon. A USB solution that would just be seen as a soundcard would be far superior in my opinion.