Personally I'd prefer to wait until September next year. Hopefully by that time, the NHL and NHLPA will have stopped acting like babies and learnt to share...
Even if the NHL lock-out isn't incorporated in the game, there is still the displacement of players that would have to be incorporated. Teams in various leagues in North America and Europe have released or relegated players to make room to sign the locked-out NHLers. Perhaps waiting until next September would avoid this rubbish.
IIRC, national teams were intended to be incorporated into a patch rather than included in the first version (there is a thread here somewhere about it). Perhaps a delay would allow time for this to be incorporated in the first version. I know it's not everybody's priority, but it'd be nice to see the first version as complete as possible - and it would help sales.
In the mean time, there is still EHM and both the continually updated modern and 1974 retro rosters, etc. That has kept me going for the past five years...