Verizon's having Qualcomm fall on its sword earlier in the year with the announcement that LTE was delayed; Verizon's restated their commercial rollout as last half of 2010. If you recall, they were aggressively saying 2009 in 2008 and now they say 2010 in 2009. Now on the positive side, they are going to trial this year. Let's give them credit for pushing the effort ahead of the vendors. While too often the innovations are being driven by the vendors. In Verizon's case the migration has three purposes. 

1) Live up to the 700 MHz commitment. Verizon told the FCC they intend to be delivering by 2010 and they will find some way to say they did their best. 

2) Change the model. The strategy for LTE starts with data services. Expect the commercial release to be based on a USB connection to your computer. 

3) Finally, it's a promise to slow the bleeding of the data customers. While Verizon has done a good job of providing data services on their existing networks, the promise of LTE is the story they are using to compete with others data offerings. 

The reality of LTE is that the standard is going to be iterative and OFDM / MIMO are new technologies for the carrier to support. The evolution naturally will take a while.