I'm really looking forward to seeing apache solr + ubercart 2.x + a bunch of catalog facets come out. That'll be a huge improvement to the feature set of the catalog.

I say this, because i'm having to code some filter + sort code right now and it's painful.

Problem is, all my cheap clients on Shared Hosting are going to have to pay for more expensive hosting should they want these features, just to get solr to work....but I guess that's the trade off.