What I find exciting is the increasing integration of Telepathy into Gnome apps. The idea is to enable easy networking for all applications so the user can just pick contacts out of their address book and never have to worry about ip addresses or nat traversal. Things like collaborative editing or music streaming can be built on top of Telepathy rather than every application doing its own networking.

More examples:

http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/2009-07-07-lets...