I think you hit the nail on the head where Amazon needs to go. Logistics and shipping are pretty much where that company must go to continue its path. I wouldnt be surprised if Amazon did try to venture into that arena by acquisition/merger.
It's quite attractive to us as a retailer as they take all the negative feedback, handle returns, etc etc. FBA makes us, as a retailer, look good and saves us money (no shipping costs), while protecting our reputation.
From a logistics point of view it simplifies things immensely (we just need to manage stocks in another warehouse).
Coding this should, however, be interesting :)
They will probably be announcing some sort of global supply chain and fulfillment service.
And the building blocks look interesting: robots, amazon level customer service and fulfillment, better supplier financing(enabled by sales data), global handling services(customs ,etc), offering better IT tools(for example demand prediction, A/B testing globally), Advertising deals on the amazon platform, etc. Almost like telling the manufacturer: you just build stuff, we'll do the rest for you.
If this guess is true, seeing all this packaged would be very interesting.
AWS and MechTurk both came from Amazon realising it could commoditise and spin off what it was using internally as separate products. A kind of reverse dogfooding.
On the flip side, I have to wonder if this is actually something of a benefit for Amazon. They get to save a ton of money by using a cheap delivery service, but the delivery service takes much of the heat for bad service. I'm a little annoyed with Amazon for using LaserShip, but I'm much more annoyed with LaserShip for sucking. If Amazon handled the delivery, they would have to do better just to get the same amount of satisfaction from me.