Some quick items from the plenary that were interesting...

ArcGIS Server
More mentions of supporting ArcSDE on PostGIS. Mild applause from the crowd, but it seems like this is still on track to ship at 9.3
Support for ArcSDE on Oracle Express
Image Server will be integrated into Server. Not clear if it will be an extension or part of the core.
On the Mobile ADF side of things, there will be an out of the box Mobile app that ships with 9.3 - so it's no longer just a developer toolkit - I think it's now called ArcGIS Mobile...
Javascript API and REST services for the mashup crowd.

ArcGIS Explorer
Really good demo of ArcGIS Explorer and ArcWeb Services. The data was really really fast - not clear if this was running "live" or from local servers, but it was screaming fast (maybe it was all pre-cached?)
Also notable was the ESRI Content Sharing service - apparently they will host your data for you if you agree to share it. And I may have the name wrong, but I think it's called ArcDataServices which gives you the ability to request (buy? was not clear) data, which is re-projected/extracted etc for you. What was cool is that it's powered by i-cubed's DataDoors on the back end. Kudos to the whole team at i-cubed!

Support Issues
The spin on the current huge backlog of support issues was that it's due to the massive and rapid adoption of 9.2, which has overwhelmed support. That may be, but it's also pretty buggy. Anyhow - the plan to address these issues was laid out. Over the last year they have been re-structuring their whole lifecycle to include "support" as an active element. Support personnel have been physically co-located with the developers. Additionally they said they will open up the entire issue database. Total transparency. What they see, we will see. This got a lot of applause, but we will see...

There were also some cool demos, and the requisite Jack Dangermond "grand vision" segments, but overall a very good opening session. I'm actually excited to talk to the ESRI people about some of the new stuff and some of the 9.2 stuff that I had not known about.