Question as post title - does this tie me to a specific version of jQuery?
I think for now that you may be stuck with using jQuery 1.4.4.
I attempted to use the igGrid and igDataSource with jQuery 1.6.4 and had major issues with it. When I switched it to 1.4.4 it worked fine. There were some major changes to jQuery from version 1.4.4 to 1.5+ so I am guessing that there will have to be some changes made to the jQuery toolset they have now to work with newer versions of jQuery. Right now the current jQuery library version is 1.6.4 with 1.7 on the horizon so they have some catching up to do.
Indeed we tested our 11.1 with 1.4.4. Later jQuery versions introduced a few breaking changes. 11.2 that is coming up shortly will support 1.6.2.