That's the year we'll make contact, and not before.
Chris Flores, the head of Microsoft Featured Communities confirmed to Neowin by stating "As most of you are well aware, there has been quite a bit of recent speculation about Win7. While I am not at liberty to discuss the details of Win7 (yet) I do want to set the record straight that we are still shooting for 2010 - 3 years from the launch of Vista."
Bearing in mind that 2010 is just a little under a year and a half away, it's unreasonable to think that something would be released in between; however we can speculate that SP2 for Windows Vista will come before then and may introduce some new features making the upgrade from XP worthwhile. Pure speculation of course!

Link:
Windows 7 May Come 'in the next year or so' (Posted on 5th April 2008)
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