"Subsequent Expansion" is the term I'm going to use for whatever expansion brings us 7.0. Because Warlords is still a little less than three months away, it's still the "next expansion."
As some recent interviews have suggested, Blizzard wants to try to get expansions out faster, to the extent that we might actually be looking at an expansion with only two raid tiers. Personally, I'm not all that crazy about the idea (I'd rather have something like Wrath, with four raid tiers over two years, though stretching out the middle ones so we aren't stuck on the last one for so long,) but on the other hand, it increases the opportunities for all the things you wanted to hear at the latest expansion reveal, but didn't.
WoW expansions have, I believe, always been announced at Blizzcon. Indeed, it's been somewhat like clockwork (except that Blizzcon doesn't always come at the same time every year.) So here's why this could have strange consequences:
Blizzcon this year is happening, I think, in early November, or possibly late October (I don't have the date in front of me, so I could be a little off.) If they truly wish to release another WoW expansion a year after Warlords, then one would expect them to announce it at Blizzcon - right before the release of Warlords.
This seems unlikely for a number of reasons - the chief one being that in the run-up to the new expansion, they wouldn't want to distract you by saying "well, you're about to finally check out the crazy stuff we announced last year, but before you do, here's what you'll be waiting a year for while you're working on that!" It seems far more likely that at this year's Blizzcon, the WoW discussions will focus more on laying out the patch schedule and showing off new features that will make their way into the game (like Timewalker Dungeons, for example.)
But of course there is no law that says that Blizzard must only announce their new expansions at Blizzcon. Reaper of Souls, for instance, was announced elsewhere. WoW has been Blizzard's tentpole for ten years now, (though I would guess Starcraft is their most popular game,) so I would think that they would generally prefer to make the big announcements at their own convention. But just logistically, time wise, announcing a new expansion at Blizzcon wouldn't really work - if they can actually manage to speed up the process.
If they announce it this year, they steal Warlords' thunder. If they announce it next year, it means that either they're going from announcement to live in a very short span of time or they've failed at the expansion-a-year goal. Even if it's more like a year and a half of Warlords, it really means they'd have to go into Beta very soon after its announcement.
See, here's what worries me about Warlords: Two raid tiers in a single-year expansion could work (though the main pitfall I think you'd experience is that Warlords as a whole would be kind of forgettable. "Oh yeah," we'd think. "We were level 100 for a short bit in that alternate universe expansion. Weird.") But Blizzard has never been able to accelerate the expansion process. I know they claim the new people added are now "up to speed," but there's always room for new excuses that might be perfectly legitimate. If Blizzard proceeds with the assumption that Warlords is going to be shorter than previous expansions, but then it isn't, then it'll be seriously content-starved.
And just as an aside, why can't we get an expansion with more than nine dungeons at launch anymore? Counting revamps, we've had 9, 9, and now 8 with Warlords. BC had 15 and Wrath had 11. That means BC launched with nearly twice as many dungeons as Warlords has.
I'm very eager to see what Blizzard has to present at this year's Blizzcon, because while I'm seriously doubtful that they would announce a full-on WoW 7.0 expansion, I think it will be a good opportunity to gauge just where WoW is going in the next couple years.
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