When suddenly.....OpenGL 4.0 !

http://www.betanews.com/article/In-a-more-complicated-gaming-world-OpenGL-40-gets-simpler-smarter/12
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http://www.opengl.org/registry/

Direct link to spec with changes marked.

After a very quick look these are the main differences I see:

-Added tessellation shaders. They make it easier to support level-of-detal rendering where objects look good when they are near and they have less polygons when they are far away to save computation. See also.

-Added support for double-precision data in the shaders. This will allow for more accurate computations -- not sure how much this will be used in games.

-Per-sample shading. This will improve antialiasing - making edges look smoother.

There are quite a few changes in there. Some of them seem to be targeted to make it easier to port Direct3D games/apps onto OpenGL. A potential boon for developers.

Also, DirectX sucks

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

I'm a bit torn; on one hand, it's pretty easy to learn and use; take a course on computer graphics, read through the core specs, and off you go.
On the other hand, the API kind of sucks. I'm talking about the «bind this, bind that» stuff. It's just a way to hack multi-X support to everything they only supported one each of in the beginning, and it sucks for making generic engines. Vertex buffer objects add even more annoyingly roundabout binding and enabling/disabling to your code. Where's my object-oriented redesign?