Paul Jones has said it before and is saying it again - if you want to see the future of the Zend Framework look at Solar:

Solar is already doing most of what is described as the future for Zend. [...] Solar has had a framework-wide unified constructor for years now. As far as I know, Solar is the first PHP framework to demonstrate this design pattern and give it a name. [...] In addition, we already have a unified dependency injection and service locator implementation, via the unified configuration mechanism and a lazy-loading registry.

He mentions several other features that are planned for ZF that already exist like standardized configuration keys, unified exception handling, dropped use of singletons, a standard factory mechanism., namespace support and many more. Be sure to check out the comments on this one too for some for/against comments from other framework users.