Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of IP cores, but they have their place. The biggest thing that I'm a fan of is the push towards standard TCL methods for everything Vivado does or touches. That's the difference between UCF and XCF. I'm also under the impression, but don't have the experience to say for sure, that there's supposed to intermediate files for every design step and that the command line interface is better documented.

I am very impressed by the Zynq stuff. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing people using it for accelerators and such.