The embattled plan to marry satellite radio outfits XM and Sirius has yielded much hyperbole about competition, monopoly, licenses and valuation. That’s left a dearth of news or discussion about the actual services, since both have been preoccupied since, say, CES.

It’s unusual, to say the least, for two companies that over the past few years engaged in a bidding war for content — from Howard Stern and Oprah, to NASCAR and Major League Baseball. Also, where are the cool new receivers?

XM Satellite gave an update during its quarterly financial conference call on Thursday:

* General Motors recently produced its 5 millionth XM-equipped vehicle
* XM plans to “roll out 2 new plug-and-play radios (for cars) by mid-summer.” The company gave no other details, and did not mention any new iPod-like models, such as its Pioneer Inno from more than one year ago.
* XM President Nate Davis acknowledged that there has been a dearth of new products lately, but not because of the merger — it’s all about selling what they already have and focusing more on cars.

“No, it’s not merger related. We go through a product development cycle. In the late 2005, early 2006 period we had a significant effort going to the development of affordable products. But at the same time, you know, we lost energy around plug and play. We needed to reinforce our efforts in those areas.

The reason you haven’t seen a lot of new wearable, portable market products is because we have been spending some time … moving through the inventory we have got. We have new products coming out in the time frame.

We’re not really chasing, chasing growth in the retail segment as well, knowing we had to put more of our dollars, promotional dollars, in the OEM sector, we haven’t put as much in the retail sector. So we could have put more money into that area but we really wanted to drive it into OEM because that’s growing so much.”