Yes. Most reports placed time-to-available-hardware in the low years (a whole dev cycle). Perhaps those were early sensationalist reports (this article would suggest they were!), but it is a surprise if you only read them.
Variant 2 (branch target injection, retpoline style software mitigation) is the most interesting. There are certainly obvious theoretical hardware mitigation strategies like tagged BTB entries and this is the most interesting hardware fix. To me it's very cool but not particularly surprising that Intel believe they'll have pure-hardware mitigations for that soon.
And Meltdown was frankly an Intel mistake that would have been shocking if left unfixed in the next hardware revision.