The Field API is major new functionality in Drupal 7 to provide custom data types just like CCK did for previous versions of Drupal. Field API became part of Drupal 7 February, 2009, but there is still plenty of work to do.
Both Drupal and Dries Buytaert have received many honors recently. As an MIT alum (6-3 '92), however, I'm particularly pleased to see both of them in the TR35: Technology Review's annual list of leading young innovators.
I recently started using a Mac for web development (I don't love it but that's another story). At the recommendation of several friends I'm using MAMP instead of the native Apache, PHP, and MySQL; they said it was much easier to set up.