It was noted in some articles that the "expansion port" could hypothetically be used for a color passthrough module later. But I also read that the Index had a similar port and never did much of anything with it, so that may never happen.

Definitely a cost measure to not include color passthrough, I'm not in the market to replace my Quest 3S but I'm very curious to see what price they hit with this.

Nice that it has a microSD slot so you can buy the low storage on and not be stuck with 256 GB forever.