Unity is probably getting more usable. It's now got a pretty built-in backup tool. The App store thingy is better. There's something called juju, which is a "DevOps" branded deployment package, or something. It uses words "cloud", "DevOps", "charms" (wtf?) and so on, and is probably just a wrapper on apt-get, but hey, we all need new buzzwords (and I'll look into it if it stops me shooting myself in the foot too much).
Also, the lightweight distros are probably getting to the "heavy enough to use, but not too Spartan" stage that the Gnome haters want, but will become bloated in 2 years time (and the anti-bloat crowd will jump onto xmonad or something ... why can't they just maximize a terminal?).
The more things change ...
Not at all.
Juju is for quickly assembling servers or clusters on AWS or any OpenStack-compatible platform. The charms are what you use to define what the machines provide and what they require to work in order to let juju assemble the whole thing for you. I was with some of the guys working on it until yesterday, at the PythonBrasil conference. They made a couple presentations on it.
I probably missed it; what's so radical about this release? It's not even an LTS.