We don't have final specs on the 990's replacement so it's hard to say exactly how they stack up, but I would agree that the feature sets should be pretty similar. There is also an Onkyo version of the 9.8 (the 885) - both are derived from the Onkyo 905 receiver. Be sure to get the latest firmware, as it fixes a problem with intermittent "bombs" in some DTS-HD Master Audio tracks.

The 9.8 and 885 are pretty popular, both because they represented the first HDMI v1.3 processors in existence when they arrived last year and because they packed a lot of features into a single chassis.