1. This release was much more widely tested than previous releases and there is a much better likelihood that it will carry fewer problems.

2. It’s the last time people will have to manually update, as the software will be able to update itself from now on! People just wanted to get that out of the way.

For myself, I haven’t updated my main blog, but mostly because I’ve been busy. I did update it on my test server and saw that everything will work; the only thing that broke was due to updating a plugin, but I knew that would break it because the last 3 versions of the plugin work differently than the way it did when I first installed it and I liked the original way better, so jumping 3 versions is a bit much. That doesn’t affect me updating wordpress, though.

I do like the new interface a lot, especially the plugin management. Being able to install directly from wordpress is a great feature, as I assume uploading a zip file directly probably is (haven’t needed that yet.) Even for somebody savvy enough to edit & create his own plugins, it still saves me time from downloading, extracting, opening FTP, doing the FTP, then activating…now I just do a quick search, get the latest version of a plugin, install and done.