Apple iPhone's Partner in Japan

Brad offers his take on what it will take for Apple to bring the iPhone over to Japan, but I have to disagree with him on one point. He only mentions that they would go with either the bands used by DoCoMo or AU, but isn’t it pretty obvious that they’ll be doing business with Softbank? Apple entered in a partnership with Softbank last year, and all we’ve seen up until now is a pairing of Softbank models with an iPod nano, but the fact that they made a big deal of the partnership initially suggests that something much bigger was/is planned.