In a recent press release from Zend, they talk about some of the latest updates to the Zend Framework 2 project (the release of Beta 3) and what it offers developers:

This new revision of the framework is geared towards greater developer productivity and application performance, providing rich support for the leading cloud services and providers, and a streamlined and simple workflow for developing next-generation mobile applications and APIs.

[...] Zend Framework 2 highlights [include]: Simpler and easier to use components, better modularity and code reuse, significantly improved performance, an entirely new Cloud Infrastructure component and full PHP 5.3 support right now.

The project roadmap has the Beta 4 release happening in the second quarter of 2012 with a general availability release happening the following quarter (Q3). Guides are in the works to help ease the transition from the 1.x releases of Zend Framework up to 2.x.