In addition to starting up an interim release 3.6 that NetBeans initially didn't consider doing they have also recently proposed major changes to the 4.0 plan. Originally a re-worked Projects system was to be the centerpiece of the 4.0 release, but that has for the most part been scrapped. The big reasons pusing this? It was consuming too much resources that they felt should go to requested features such as code folding and (no suprise) refactoring. Some projects stuff will come in but most of the projects bugs will be closed as WONTFIX.
A real IDE arms race is heating up now that it seems that NetBeans realized that this is a battle that is winnable and worth fighting. But honestly I don't see there being only one true IDE for java like Visual Studio is for Windows development. Combine this news with the recent additon of a Visual GUI Editor to Eclipse means that Netbeans 4.0 and Eclipse 3.0 should have very solid parity with no clear advantage to either. Things will get very interesting if the common IDE plugins JSR gets supported by both as well.