I was watching the 2 WIP videos about iClone 7 which did their job of both showing some of the new features, and raising the level of anticipation for it.
Afterwards, I started thinking about how much the new cameras, lights, materials, and character creation/animation seem so different than what is currently available.
It made me wonder if those new features would be so different that all my previous content would need to be re-textured for PBR, lighting redone, and
camera positions/motions remade to fit in with the native iC7 content?
I have some new models I was going to load into 3DXchange to convert for use in iC6, but my aforementioned concern stopped me.
Would it be better to wait for all the new versions to launch before converting my models, and making the new characters I want in CC, or not?

This is pure speculation, but usually projects from the previous iClone version will work in the new version, meaning that your cameras from iClone projects will still behave the same. It's just when creating new cameras you have additional features to play with. When iClone 6 came out, most of my iClone 5 project just worked. You will most likely also have your existing lighting working the same.

I believe it will be similar with the shaders. The old materials will still work, but to make fully use of the PBR shader they will need to be converted. 

What I've done with some of my older IC5 projects was to gradually convert them to get them up-to-date for IC6. Now if there is a lot of new content, then it's probably better to wait, although you can still convert external pros as that is what you need to do anyway. I do most of my character work in CC, so if you have DAZ characters for example, material conversion will be needed.

Hopefully, Peter (RL) can provide some further clarity on how this could best be handled.

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  That could be.. I'm concerned that everything will look crude when loaded up into the newer version.

Converting is not difficult to do. Substance materials are probably the biggest issue. The earlier ones from RL are not PBR, AFAIK. RL will be releasing new PBR materials packs, and you also will be able to use Substances from other sources, like Substance Share, that are PBR.

When you see what you can do with materials, you probably will want to update some and not worry about others.

Thank you for that information. Sounds like I could possibly do the majority of the character creation in the current one, and then load it into the new one to do the materials as well as any other finishing touches. Likewise for my custom props/sets that I made for my projects.

Things shouldn't look worse than before.
But if you have a lackluster prop near a really spectacular PBR prop, it will suffer from the comparison.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I try not to make lackluster ones, but sometimes I discover it's the wrong size, or something in comparison to the enviroment.
Sometimes the material layers didn't convert from Blender correctly, or the map was wrong.