System Center Essentials 2012 - Wherefore art thou?

A customer came with a query the other day on the back of the System Center 2012 licensing changes.
They were asking what impact this would have on System Center Essentials since that is what they currently use, and what was the roadmap for a newer version.

Since I focus predominantly on the "Bigger" version of the System Center stack, it made me realise that maybe subconsciously I had been filtering out any Essentials information so I thought it was time to do a quick review of the changes.

However... as I started to do some digging I realised there was a distinct lack of information around System Center Essentials, almost to the point where I thought a black hole had appeared next to Redmond and sucked every snippet of info into it about Essentials.

I did manage to find this comment though on the Technet Forums from Yog Li, a Technet Forum Assistant:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/systemcenter/thread/71b4c1f3-a444-4299-ba37-2d84b4fbabbf

/Quote

We have not yet provided an update or roadmap regarding SCE.

As we move forward with the development of System Center 2012, we remain committed to providing a “right-sized” set of management tools for IT in the midmarket segment that makes it easy for these customers to set up and manage Hyper-V. We anticipate that details on our midmarket strategy will be released in the months ahead. We will be sure to communicate any updates through all regional marketing leads and channels as well as this discussion group.

In the interim, Essentials 2010 remains an important and strategic management solution as part of Microsoft’s System Center family of IT systems management products allowing us to compete head-to-head with VMware in the midmarket segment. SCE 2010 is easy to deploy and provides customers a unified single console solution that enables proactive IT management of more physical and virtual Windows Servers than ever before.

In FY12, SCE 2010 continues to play an important role for our customers and their Journey to the Cloud as part of the Managed Virtualization story for the mid-market segment.

/End Quote

The question this raises now is, just how likely is it that we will see a SCE2012 version?
It's highly unlikely at this stage of the game that one will be available at the same time as the rest of System Center 2012 launches.

To be honest, is there a place anymore for SCE?  With the new licensing changes providing SC2012 as a bundle only and for those with Virtualisation it should be fairly cost effective to license for the full SC2012.  Only downside is multiple consoles.

So for now it's pretty much wait and see....