I think your question is, do you need to jailbreak before you activate or not. To answer that question, no, unless apple threw in a bunch of new security that people don't know about yet. You would want to activate your iphone first, then jailbreak once the new jailbreak is released (hopefully sometime in the near future). And though I've never personally tried jailbreaking first, then activating second, I would think that iTunes would recongnize your phone is jailbroken during the activation, and may refuse to activate. If this is the case, I'd imagine you would just reset your phone to factory default and then reactivate.
Good luck!