Saw a couple videos online that said they are supposed to have some new cooling technology, but I think they will be rebranded 5970's more or less. Just my own cautions, but I feel like the first few hundred cards will have higher defect rate(I shun new tech I guess).
Rebranded 5870's
Stupid change in the naming system makes the 69xx the high end, single GPU card, like the 58xx cards were, rather than like the 59xx, which were multi-GPU cards
I think with the 6xxx generation of cards, we will be seeing the return of the 4xxx series way of naming multi-GPU cards, by having, for example, a 6970x2, which would be 2 6970 chips on 1 PCB
I don't think the first will have a higher defect rate, they are all tested to the same standards, and usually the initial cards are the same as the ones that you get 6 months down the line. The only thing to give the higher "defect" rates would be drivers. With the first set of drivers, you usually have worse performance, and a lot of problems, however the bugs are usually fixed with in a few weeks or so, and after that it is just optimizing the code to give much better performance