Microsoft screwed up big for customer confusion on this one.
First it was the attempt to explain the "red and green" model for compatibility in .NET 3.0. Now, it is announcing that .NET 3.0 will not include C# or VB 3.0, but will be an "additive release". Do you understand that? Even with pictures, you have to wonder what they were thinking.
Everyone Microsoft is just bubbling over with support and entheusiasm. Customers are much less so. The general belief is that .NET is now heading down the evil Java naming path where you end up with things like Java 2 Platform SE SDK 5.0 (version 1.5).
Corrected: Even better, .NET 3.0 will be shipped with Vista. I guess that means .NET 3.0 will mean something different on XP machines (since Vista offers capabilities which will not be backported to XP), but MS does not explain that. How will the bits be backported? MS does not explain that. How will the bits be identified? MS does not explain that. How will Orcas affect versioning? MS does not explain that.
Update 1: This is closer to what we should have gotten from the beginning.
Soma may be proud with his choice, but the reclamas and the "clearing the confusion" blog entries show that both the decision and its announcement were very badly done. Never build up an accepted usage and expectation then change everything with bad explanations. This should have been a very detailed article with a FAQ, not a short blog post.
Also, Kirk Allen Evans cannot get the name of the current products correct -- it is VB 2005, not VB.NET 2005 -- you rebranded it, remember? (It would also be nice if he turned on comments for his post.)
Update 2: Julia Lerman does the research. With the benefit of almost four additional months of Microsoft explanations, she describes what they tried to tell us back in June. She convinces me even more that .NET 3.0 is a marketing ploy to make Vista sound like it was advancing the .NET Framework when it is not. They changed the meaning of the version numbers with an extraordnarily poor and weak explanation.
Update 3: I have posted a follow-on to this topic here.