Samsung CEO told me personally that we will not get Jellybean because the Note does not have 5 buttons navigation that the OS required.
However, we will get Kandycane as it does not require any buttons.
it would depend on the difference between ics and jellybean, which i'd expect to be a lot less than the difference between gingerbread and ics.
gingerbread > ics was a massive change in terms of functionality, so i'd imagine it was a difficult upgrade to roll out. hopefully jellybean is more evolution than revolution and we won't be kept waiting quite so long