First impression: faster. These days IDEA is a beast of an IDE. I find 7 much better than 6 in terms of features and speed. But 8 is nippier, especially for starting up and compile. Second impression: stable. I've been banging at it for 3 days and it hasn't crashed once. EAP for 7 was flakey at times. I'll probably switch over fully to 8, even with the loss of plugins. The UI is slightly cleaner, especially around the tabs area. but nothing radical (which is fine).
At the moment Groovy or Ruby support isn't available, and inbuilt Python and Scala support will arrive. I use Eclipse/PyDEV for Python, but I'll be very interested to see what if anything they do for Scala refactoring, especially given the power of its type system. Apparently Grails and Struts2 will be supported - good. The SQL/MySQL support is very handy.
I haven't had a chance to use the Jersey/JSR-311 support yet, but I'm buzzed about proper support for *something* other than query parameters in Java (JSR-311 is close to going into final call, os it should be safe to integrate the IDE) - Jersey is a tidy piece of code. I hope the major web frameworks will follow up and support it (especially Spring MVC). There's also full blown support for Freemarker and Velocity; it's very nice to see something other than JEE/JSP sanctioned templating.
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