I called Cakewalk a while back and asked them if they will be coming out with surround sound panners and encoding plugins. They said no, they were not planning on it. Since then Logic Audio has as well as Nuendo. I think with Cakewalk it's just a matter of time.
As far as encoding goes, Minnetonka has been around for quiet awhile offering DTS encoding software for $500. There are others now coming out but after talking to the guys at Minnetonka, I'll wait for DVD. Right now a DVD player/recoder is $5000, and he said in a few years they will drop to what CD recorders are. He said then you won't need the encoder software at all. So I figured why spend the 500, I'll wait.
But even so, you still can't use Cakewalk because you can only pan Left and Right.