I think the new Global Illumination render option (which includes caustics) is worth the price of admission by itself. Very easy to configure and relatively quick to render and you can get some surprisingly nice results without too much effort. Radiosity in packages like Lightwave 7.5 and C4DXL7 can take all day to render plus I think the Carrara caustics look nicer than the Lightwave ones anyway. If you use the vertex modeller (personally I tend to do my modelling in C4DXL7) I think you'll also appreciate the new smoothing option. With v2 you also have the option to get VectorStyle for Flash output. Compared to Lightwave or C4D the new bones feature is very easy to use although I don't know if it has enough features yet for sophisticated character animation.