When Pablo Castro blogged about the October CTP of ADO.NET vNext, I was so intent on reading what was in there, that I glazed over the fact that they will now call it ADO.NET Orcas. That will hopefully clear up the confusion of what this verson of ADO.NET is associated with. (Orcas is the code name of the next Visual Studio.)
The October CTP confused a lot of people because it was focused on fleshing out the Entity Framework stuff and was not fully merged with the August CTP, so you basically have to choose right now between playing with Linq and the designer in the August CTP or getting up to speed with the Entity Framework. In the end, all of these will be major pieces of the next version of ADO.NET.
Another point of confusion I have read and heard was about LINQ for ADO.NET (that is how to refer to whole collection of Linq flavors: Linq to SQL, Linq to Entities and Linq to Datasets) is there in addition to all of the ADO.NET goodness that we have today.
You can read more in Pablo's post.