Thought I'd share this with the forum:
Cognos 7.3 MR1 is scheduled to be released on 3/13/06.
Contributor Data Server (CDS) is scheduled to be released at the end of March. CDS will allow for "real-time" reporting off of the underlying Contributor XML. You can use the Contributor tables as a data source. I have been using it for a few months and it is prety cool, but has a few limitations due to the nature of xml. The coolest report that I have built thus far is a "real time" view of the Contributor work flow.