The smart "if" template tag (<a href="http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2-alpha-1/#smart-if-tag" rel="nofollow">http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2-alpha-1/#s...</a>) was quite the welcome surprise for me in the release notes! I swear I've written a dozen custom template tags all because it wasn't possible to perform simple comparisons in the if condition.
multiple database connections is going to be my favorite new feature:
<a href="http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/</a>