According to IGN's Craig Harris who is currently live blogging the OS 4.0 conference, Steve Jobs said that they "figured it out".

10:14 Big one: Multitasking! "We're gonna be the best!"

10:15am If you don't do it just right, you'll get sluggish performance and terrible battery life. Apple's figured it out. "We think we've nailed it."

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Personally I'm pretty excited, because I hate having to reload a game when I get a call (yeah right, like anyone calls me) or a text. This bodes well for the iPad as well, one giant hurdle out of the way, several to go.

Thoughts?

Finally I say! Now let's see them release it!

Sounds pretty good. It should help all the iPad users out there especially.

It's exclusive to the 3GS and third generation iPod Touch btw.

That would be because they have twice the RAM of previous iTouch devices.

I'll be interested to see how Apple handles this. Or rather, how my phone's interface and battery will handle it.

Any word on FM radio functionality? I've heard it might be on its way, sometime.

Edit: Skimmed through the link.

Sad to see no FM radio. Still curious as to how these background APIs will be managed by the user. OpenFeint will be annoyed that Game Center has made them obsolete.

I see Apple has cooked up a plan to combat free, ad-supported apps where Apple bears all the distribution costs, but earns no store revenue: Serve the ads.

I'm aware, just pointing it out

Dammit! Really?!?! Dammit. . .

11:01 am: Recapping everything now. There's still 93 features we haven't gone over yet, but there's only so many minutes in a day. 

End users get it this summer, developers can try it out today. It's for 3GS and third gen iPod Touch. Some things won't run on 3G and Second gen iPod touch, like multitasking. Coming to the iPad this Fall.

Have I been living in the ilusion that iPhone had multitask since day one?

I could swear that I saw a friend googling and receiving messages at the same time x_X

The iPhone has always been perfectly capable of multitasking... but only with Apple's apps. The phone functionality is always going, apps download in the background while you surf, and music from your iPod will play while you're in most apps.

Multitasking for third party apps has been missing due to concerns of resource management, battery drain, and poor user experience. For a lot of apps, save states are an adequate substitute, allowing you to leave a document you're editing, search for a block of text on the internet, and return to your document to paste it in. But you can't monitor an IM client or listen to streaming NPR while you work on that document.

So Apple now figures it has cooked up some APIs that will allow background processes to run without substantially impacting performance or battery life. So you can launch NPR's streaming app, start a stream, then go to another app and everything in the NPR app will quit except the audio stream. Sounds like they might have made some improvements to save states, too.