I don't think there is going to be a lot of nifty stuff in the phone (if Google is in fact doing this). From Googles perspective, I think they want a phone that delivers the full Android experience without custom OEM 'user experience additions' and carrier application cruft (I'm looking at you T-Mobile).

I would be surprised if you see anything non-standard on a Google phone.

Yes, but they'll also have the opportunity to put in innovative things that the carriers might not think of.

I don't really follow Android too closely, why couldn't they just put that those in the upstream Android distribution rather than just the version for their phone?

The most likely thing is that they'll do that, but that carriers will leave things out.