It's nice to see the chain of events: first a nice 2D API (cairo), then GTK standardizing on it (in 2.8), and now all apps get cross-platform printing (2.10).
I've also been following some GTK/GNOME developer blogs and they've been putting a lot of effort into performance, which is pretty neat, and uncharacteristic of free software developers in general ("fast enough on my computer, whatever"). Everything's already really zippy on the computers I use but I'm sure faster can't hurt.