Angie Byron, lead maintainer of Drupal 7 gave a nice talk on the upcoming features in Drupal 7. She started off the talk by making it very clear that things will break. "We'll break your code, not your data," is the motto.

Features:

During installation, you can choose minimal or standard installations. Minimal gets rid of the annoying admin modules that come with Drupal 7.

Fields can be translated and there is a new translation interface

Database Abstraction Layer. It now supports any PDO supported database, not just Mysql.

Toolbar module. that's the big black bar that appears at the top after installing drupal. They revamped the Info Architecture based on what they thought people needed as opposed to how developers thought it should work. The admin bar is configurable so you can add shortcust for things you use often. There is a contexual dropdown that appears when you hover over blocks.

The overlay. I really don't like this, but I see why they did it.

Dashboard. This gives you quick access to settings for modules and allows you to drag blocks where yo8u want them.

Latest version of Jquery comes with core.

Help is vastly improved. It is now readaable and well organized

Article and Basic Page. Instead of Page and story content types, they changed the names. New names are much better.

There is native image handling with core. Really it's just iamge field, but it is kind of a bizarr thing that has kept Drupal behind wordpress in adoption.

Input formats. Much more condensed field and makes more sense.

Vertical tabs: Angie's original usability feature for Drupal 6 (Vertical tabs module) made it into 7 core.

Primary Links is called Main Menu and Secondary menu is Secondary links.

Image cache is not called Image files and is in core.

CCK is in core.

Administrator role. Came from Admin Role module.

New permissions so you don't have to rely on administer nodes.

Node access imporovements.

Install modules from a url.

private and public file directories.

Testing framework.

Appearance page (themes picker). They got rid of all the old ugly core themes. There is a theme called Stark that comes with no theming, but it's a blank slate and a good theme starter.

Accessibility. There is a lot of updates in core now.