I've moved the former article on this topic to the archives, since things changed today and much of what I wrote is now dated. The change? Adobe released Lightroom 2.0. While it's not mentioned in any of the postings on Adobe's site or the Adobe staff blogs that I can find (I'm sure this will change quickly ;~), the new version of Lightroom can process the D700 NEF files. Indeed, so can the release version of ACR 4.5. According to one of the developers, the support is preliminary, meaning that they haven't verified the profiles yet.
And perhaps I was painting Adobe with a bit too harsh a brush. Adobe's product manager for Lightroom and ACR pointed out to me that they have a very good relationship with Nikon. It appears that the slight delay in D700 support from Adobe was more due to a pre-existing release date for Lightroom 2.0. But this does point out the problem I was trying to illustrate: if a camera maker is too tight on information or releases it too close to the ship date of a camera the third-party community may have problems matching that date due their own pre-existing product schedules. Still, it would have been nice if Adobe would have had Nack or someone else there with a blog post something along the lines of "D700 support is imminent" when the camera shipped on July 25th.
Meanwhile, Bibble has released version 4.10.1, which includes D700 support.
So, two down, more to go. For Apple Aperture users, the latest 2.1.1 update (issued today) doesn't include D700 support. However, it appears that you can edit the plist and do the D700/D3 fakeout for the time being.