Now that Nikon has managed a "hot" product release without running short of supply, you may have discovered that all is still not well in release-land. Here's the issue that Nikon persistently refuses to address: those of us who don't base our workflow on Nikon Capture NX2 consistently are left completely dead in the water if we buy new Nikon gear when it's released.
If you've tried bringing a D700 NEF into Photoshop CS3, Lightroom, or Aperture, you'll know what I mean: they don't support D700 images. We've been fighting this problem big time ever since the encrypted white balance controversy on the D2x. Putting tens of thousands of cameras into the market without third-party software support is a no-no in my book. This is akin to putting out an operating system without revealing details to developers.
It's not as if the software companies we're talking about (Adobe, Apple, etc.) don't know what an NDA is and how to honor it, after all. The failure, I believe, is at Nikon's end. They are simply not getting the right information into the right hands early enough in the process. At a minimum, a well-supported software community would be making support announcements coincident with announcement or ship of a new DSLR. At a maximum, we'd have Day One support.
I think it's high time for the camera makers to start thinking of their products more as an ecosystem than a proprietary lock box. I'll know they've gotten the message when we have product introductions more akin to Apple's: where representatives from third party companies get up and pledge their support, demonstrate working products, and announce tentative ship dates.
Of course, one fly in the ointment is Nikon's vested interest in Nik. I'm sure the folks at Nik lobby for the opposite of what I'm asking for, because it means that their product, Nikon Capture NX2, will be the only one you can use when the new camera comes out. This comes dangerously close to the definition of illegal tying in US product law, actually.
If Nikon really wants to convince the professional photography market that it is making professional products, it has to acknowledge and support the fact that many of the professionals and organizations they work with do not, and will not, use Capture NX2 in their workflow.
So what do you do if YOU are dead in the water with your new D700? With a hex editor (e.g. hexedit for Windows, 0XeD for Mac) look for the first instance of the string "D700" and replace that with the hex values 44 33 00 00. If I'm not mistaken, that happens at offset 176 hex. If you're afraid to do it by hand, you can try one of the third-party options that have appeared, such as this one from a regular dpreview poster. Do not make these changes on your original D700 NEF. Instead, make a copy and perform the change on it. Save your original files for when Lightroom and the other products update in the near future.