With nothing new on the Nikon horizon other than the release of the latest Coolpix brood to the wild, it seems that virtually anything that's said gets blown up into "news" proportions. The interview with Nikon Imaging's marketing director by DC Watch (a Japanese Web site) is an example, even though it didn't really say anything newsworthy. Nikon is still developing DSLR cameras at basically the same rate, the direction is basically what you'd guess. The translations and summations I've seen actually attribute more to the words than was spoken.
One question I get a lot lately relates to this, though: will the camera companies cut back on R&D? The answer to that is no, they will not. First, development for many products, especially the higher end ones, is a multiyear process, thus any really substantive change to R&D wouldn't normally be felt for more than a generation of camera. The Japanese camera companies have been through down cycles before, and they realize that cutting back R&D actually makes it tougher to recover when the market eventually heats up again.
What does happen sometimes is that the roll-out of a product in development is moved from its original timing. This can work both ways. Sometimes the roll-out is moved up because the thought is that a new product will improve short-term sales. But more normally the product will be moved slightly further out for launch to a time, situation, or platform where the company thinks they can get more promotion.
The question is this: what's that platform going to be? For example, Japan's Photo Imaging Expo is coming up starting on the 26th. Could the Japanese companies like Nikon withhold an announcement at PMA simply to do one a few weeks later at a local show in order to save some money? Perhaps. The Japanese Camera Industry Association also runs a show in spring each yer that could provide the same type of benefit. Note that Japanese market camera sales are down substantially. I'm pretty sure that the camera makers want to do something to help revive the local market, so I wouldn't be surprised to see low-to-midrange offerings to be done with some sort of local announcement at PIE or JCIA.
That said, I still think we're not going to see another DSLR from Nikon until May or June, and that is most likely to be a low-end replacement for the D40 and maybe the D60. For more sophisticated cameras (e.g. D400), I still say that late summer is a more likely time period. Of Nikon's 21 DSLR announcements, 6 have been in the first quarter, 4 in the second quarter (which we're about to enter), 7 in the third quarter (all D80 or higher), and 4 in the last quarter of the year.