Inkscape 0.49 isn't out yet, no timetable either but I did find a preview of the Release notes 0.49 that's worth a read.

Thanks for the heads up, Odin!

Read the whole thing. Some new features are very interesting.
OpenML needed to be done yesterday. Still, graphic accelerator is just a half-measure to speed up Inkscape.
Unless the program accesses GPU chipset directly it will always be lagging while processing data from huge vector files.

A lot of other changes are just 3rd party extensions that will be part of standard package. I already have most of them as installed addons.