Calum pointed to a sneak peak at a GIMP 2.0 Usability Test. Interesting stuff. I have to admit that as I've been using photoshop more and more lately it seems that The Gimp is falling more and more behind in various respects... however, a lot of the fuctionality is still there. However, it's still not the most easily gotten used to program in the world in it's odd "look ma, no main window" paradigm. Also the incarnations on other platforms (windows, os/x) are pretty horrible performance wise, which leads to people discounting the GIMP as crap when it's not really it's fault (ie: the stupid click to focus problems under os/x).
In other GIMP news, "Film-GIMP", a version of the gimp designed for 16 bit images, film and other such like is now (well, probably really old news) known as CinePaint. Hope they can update this to use the new 2.0 release UI.