If by soon, you mean half a year, then yes, it's closing in.
Dude, get GIMP. Paint is used for the most BASIC, and I mean BASIC, art applications. Keep away from it unless you need to see something in a certain way. And GIMP won't leave messy JPEG artefacts all over the place, since you can save pictures as gif's, png's and a load of other file types.