3.0 could take off fast. We believe that the connectors were shown for the first time publicly at this year's CES, and at least one manufacturer is already working the spec into their laptops. Eagle-eyed scouts at The Register spotted two USB 3.0-like ports in the Asus' M50 laptop.
But it's sort of complicated. The transition of USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 will increase the number of wire contacts from 4 to 5. The Register spotted ports that made room for the fifth wire contact but still sported only four, meaning that Asus was framing their system for USB 3.0 even though they weren't technically adopting the spec just yet. Given that USB 3.0 will bring data transfers up to 4.7GB/sec, we're fine with companies pushing this technology onto us.