soft selection tool is pretty interesting. It's not like the one in 3d studio. It's more like a gradiant from a vertice or point instead of a brush like operation. the advantage of this is that you can use scale and rotate on the area youve soft selected.

Hair is nice although i dont like how it has its own gravity built into it. a work around appears to be to convert it into poly's, maybe this will remove the gravity effect.

Deformers for particles is great. you can do the scene in Matrix revolutions where the squidies are coming into Zion with ease. twist them turn them whatever you want.\

Fluid effects cache is larger but havent messed with it yet. It appears that you can create your own temporary cache with more control over advanced features.