What is important is ensuring that future Oyster equipment (Oyster
scanners on gates and in ticket offices etc) will be able to handle ITSO-
standard smartcards as well

ISTR reading in here some time back this was already the case. The Oyster
top up POM reads my works ID with the message "Your smart card is not
initialised for Prestige" (the project name for Oyster). I can't put both
cards in one wallet - it brings up the code for "more than one card read"
when presented to an Oyster pad. The pads at work do not respond to an
Oyster at all and if both are in one wallet it works fine there, so I
assume their readers are only able to talk to whichever standard the works
ID conforms to.

Regards, Dave