From what I hear, it will never support bitstream output (to pass HD audio to a receiver for processing) due to the version of the HDMI chipset used (and the chipset version was not changed in the 40gb model).

However it could decode them internally and pass them out as 7.1 PCM, which is essentially as good. It does this currently for Dolby TrueHD, but does NOT support the same for DTS MA. This *could* be added via a firmware upgrade and is a hotly requested feature by PS3 owners.