I believe ZeniMax bought a license for NaturalMotion's Euphoria middleware a couple of years back. It creates animations on-the-fly so characters deal with situations realistically. It's used by Rockstar in GTA and that Redemption thing.
I can't see them not incorporating it in their engine. Of course, you never know.

There were also some people suggesting they'd use Umbra Software's Occlusion Booster, which basically calculates what objects are in line of sight and generates only those, instead of loading content per cell. Apparently Gstaff picked it up and brought it to the attention of Todd.
There's even less of a guarantee they incorporated this in their new engine, but it's a possibility. Let's hope they either bought a license or came up with something comparable themselves.

The whole idea is to have some fun making educated guesses about the graphics technology that will be used for TES:V. When screenshots start being released, we then get to see how good the predictions were.

I'm using the percentages to illustrate the strength of my belief. This is the complete opposite of being precise - it is an acknowledgement of the lack of precision.

That's a very interesting question. I suspect that they will handle this in the same way as Oblivion, because I'm guessing that some of the underlying technology is going to be the same, and that it would be quite difficult to implement.