All settings will change to accommodate new rules
Major changes to magic - Mystra, Weave
Setting must be more accessible to beginners (too much baggage)
Scope of changes - dramatic (e.g. rebuilding / re-concepting gods and cosmology)
Year - to be announced later (New Year)
Ed is involved in every stage, tackling a lot of the new stuff, new locations, novels set in the new timeline
Broad themes kept - setting with a million stories to tell (all stories equally important), lots of villains, plots, and heroes, high magic setting (many different sorts of magic), feeling of age and legacy (ancient ruins, spells, monsters)
Maztica, Al-Qadim, Kara-Tur - not going to be explored in detail, but enough detail to get you started anywhere on the planet - beyond Faerun (Ed working on this)
High-level NPCs - Mystra's Chosen not around anymore, PCs are the ones accomplishing stuff - focus on PCs in heroic, paragon, epic stories; high-level NPCs who can steal PCs' thunder are being "nuked" and "eliminated"
Threats of all levels (1-30) will be present, more new bad-guys, high-level organizations
Rich is not to blame for "New Realms" - decision made at the CORPORATE level (WotC, not Hasbro) - the team proposed the changes, not the suits
The Weave - gone, unraveled, there is something new in its place (which is completely new), he thinks that some people may not like it at first, but "it's good for the game"
WotC people don't have any internal FR campaigns going now (haven't had for a year), instead they plunder FR for their home campaigns
Many people (WotC employees included) won't run FR games because they are afraid they don't have enough knowledge of the setting to achieve a "true FR feel" - they tried to deal with this problem
Other designers working on 4e Realms now: Eric Boyd, Bryan James, Rich Baker, Chris Sims, Bruce Cordell, Rob Heinsoo & Logan Bonner (mechanics - new races, new powers)
Team sat down with Phil Athkins to determine the schedule for revealing the changes (year, Spellplague, etc) - bulk of info will be revealed in GamerZero and D&D Insider
Another implication that "they know the best time to reveal info, trust them" (they openly admit they want to hype the game)
Poster's personal opinion: 4e FR is not really FR. They will try really hard to sell it as FR, but really, it's a whole new setting. Also, hype sucks and can only lead to disappointment.