Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, the man who provided most of the information about PC Halo during the recent Fanstock event, has been interviewed by Computer and Video Games. Highlights include the fact that playing as the Covenant-- originally a central idea in Halo's design, pre-buyout-- was discussed and rejected. And while bots will not be in the game as shipped, the possibility exists for something in the future:

One is that the network architecture was re-written, so if we were to do bots, we'd start it now, which means the product would take even longer. This may still happen - I mean BotMan, the guy who created the foundations for all of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike bots, he works at Gearbox! He sits in that office right over there [points]. We'd like to expose this stuff to mod authors to see what they come up with. We've designed the network game so you could add bots.

Of course, then there's also Pritchford replying "no, no" to the idea that there are secret plans to bring Halo 2 to the PC. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.