HM, and people already talking about WP 8.2 and WP 9 hahaha
Yep, and you will hear that this early. Windows Phone 8.1 was pretty much finalized about 2-3 months ago. The feature set was locked in, nothing else unless they were needed (a feature by default needed a setting page instead of being automatic, for example). So as the Dev teams were working on 8.1, another team, with the feature list that is planned to come in 8.1 is designing the next set of features that will come on the NEXT update (as you have heard 8.2 or 9, personally think it will be 8.5 if it's a major update).
So, yes, if you got a Microsoft person "In the know" to leak something, you would find out new features are planned for a later version of the software. It's just the way it works in big dev companies, like MS, nothing that is "on the fly", everything is planned for a production product.
This would be expected but, it's nice to know that the next step in Windows Phone would be 6-8 months after 8.1 release