I agree with Gonk. The 1.4 spec is a bit irrelevant for the time being and I'm not even aware of any shipping chipsets supporting it.

The gaffe for the 997 and the Sherwood equivalent is not that it's obsolete when it eventually ships, but that it has missed a substantial window of opportunity when it could have been sold at a premium over typical "prosumer" products that have now long since been available. So Sherwood and Outlaw will lose out on the opportunity to charge the premiums necessary to quickly recoup their development costs and will instead be forced to compete with more cut-rate pricing. I suspect they'd hoped to avoid that until quite a bit longer into the product's life cycle.