Seven years. What a colossal failure for the IEEE. Any insight on why it took so long?

The Aussie government research lab CSIRO held patents on some of the technology and only agreed a resolution early this year.

How can there be patentable technology in a specification?

If it's a specification shouldn't it by definition omit implementation details?

Often there's only one natural way to implement something. For example, AFAIK everyone uses FFT to implement OFDM.

Do we infer the lack of needed standards?

Good standards are discovered not imposed.

What does this mean for me? Will I get super fast wifi now? how fast?

All the devices out there that say "802.11n" on the box also have a disclaimer saying "draft standard". Now they can omit the disclaimer.