A free beta of the new Photoshop was released today and Marc Edwards posted a rundown of some of the improvements:

Layer styles can now be applied to groups in the same way they can be applied to bitmap, vector and type layers

This is great, turning groups into smart objects is no longer necessary.

The colour picker now accepts HEX colours that include a #.

This was an annoying bug when copy/pasting color strings from the web.

Adobe also re- redesigned the interface, looks cleaner still.