I'm sitting here at CFUnited thinking that I can't wait to get back to the office to install ColdFusion 8. The new tags don't thrill me, as I still haven't used any of the new CF 7 tags, but three things really stand out from Ben Forta's presentation this morning:

1. Enhanced speed. This is a big one. There were some benchmarks shown of 50% and more increase in many of the basic ColdFusion constructs, such as initiating CFCs (9 times faster, as I remember) and simple things like cfparam, date functions, and regular expression throughput. Since these are things I use all the time, I will be interested in doing some of my own benchmarks.
2. Multiple CF Administrator logins. This is one of those things that has been asked for every year probably since the first CF version. It's something that should have been in the product from the start, as the current CF7 and earlier installations assume that you are the only person on the server. That is almost never the case.
3. Debugging. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been harping about lack of debugging in CF for ages, and actually switched a lot of my own development to PHP only because the development environments are more friendly with debugging. I hate having to debug with trace statements and cfdump. It is so 80's.

There are a lot of cool things about CF, but the new CF 8 looks really great and worth the upgrade price. Just the performance enhancements alone are worth it. The public beta is at labs.adobe.com

Ben Forta talks about the performance enhancements in his blog