The blender team announced that Blender 2.5 Beta will be ready when the work for the Sintel movie project (durian.blender.org/) is nearly finished. Well it's the time now.
Blender 2.53 Beta (yes with a completely redesigned GUI) is now online:
www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-250/

Congratulations to the Blender open source community.

Now if I could download the bloody thing ... seems to be overloaded

About the new UI i think it is great, very clear and easy to use, I just use it for 5 minutes. I think with a quick view of the manual, you can move easier than before.

The smoke and fire renders in the web are fantastic.

I hope the ocean simulation option will be added soon.

They haven't put 2.50 into live production yet, have they ? (i.e. that's still a beta as well, correct?)

I love the new interface. I actually switched to doing everything in Blender now, doing my first custom models for poser is going excellent like this. The new sculpting options are great.

How does Blender compare to Wings3D? It seems to be more popular around Poser content creators than Blender.

I think, for me at least, wings3d is better for box modelling, it is very easy to learn  but powerful tool. I don't chage wings3d for modelling with any other application in the market, free or not.

Blender is a full 3d package, and with the new UI, I think is going to be more popular now, for my part, I am going to start using it. (except for modelling )

Quote - They haven't put 2.50 into live production yet, have they ? (i.e. that's still a beta as well, correct?)

2.50 was the original Alpha version, 2.52 was the second Alpha version and 2.53 is the first Beta version. If you are still trying out 2.50 I suggest getting the latest as there is much more functionality in it. For some reason though the 64 bit vers takes a lot longer to load and crashes more often than the 32 bit.

Although I have primarily used Blender for modeling, the new interface has actually encouraged me to delve into the other aspects of the program. Whereas previously it took longer to find the panels to set the parameters than to do what you wanted, everything is now put together much more logically. No shorthand for the buttons for example is just one area that has made things easier throughout.