That could actually open up some interesting options for the game, like guilds.
Say you've got yourself a warrior. Now in Oblivion, that warrior can join the thieves' guild. He can progress through basically all of the thieves guild quests, or mages' guild, or any other guild, despite being, at heart, a warrior, with minimal difficulty. That doesn't seem right to me, I mean, Morrowind had you needing to specialize your character to some degree to be say, a thief, or assasin, or for the mages' guild, a wizard or sorcerer. Now if you have more than one character in the same save game, you won't be limited by your one character's skillset, and ultimately have to turn him/her into some kind of all rounder. This will mean that specific quests can be more class or role specific, but at the same time leave them open to a player's one savegame.
In fact there are all kinds of places this could take the game.
Hell, think of the roleplaying you could do. How much more exciting would battlehorn castle have been if it was populated by a cast of characters you invented yourself!
Of course, unless Bethesda already had this in mind I highly doubt we'll see anything like it in the game, but I guess it's an interesting possibility for future projects.
However I'm not sure the AI companion idea is so crash hot. The Elder Scrolls aren't games about a party of players. When you aren't playing as your spare(s), they should just sit back and chill out, wait for their turn.
I mean obviously they'd defend themselves if some threat came along, but otherwise, just hang out.
In my opinion, anyway.
You get it. Even if they didn't go as far as having two characters in one save or co-op they could at least design the guild quest per class. The Mages guild would probably have quest for a thief or fighter. Guilds should have work for people that aren't fully in one class though most of it or even all of it should be a different type of work and they probably should be official members in more than one guild.