Coming Soon: WordPress 2.0 
Recent development indicates that the next version of WordPress will be 2.0. There's been a lot of activity, so it should be reasonable to expect a new release before Christmas. Of course I'm making wild speculation, and don't have any definite information. Matt or Ryan may have a different schedule in mind. The official release date remains When it's done.
I was pleasantly surprised to see my database backup plugin included! Thanks again to Owen for his help making it the successful plugin that it is. Several patches I've submitted have also been included, mostly as a result of the recent Bug Hunt weekend.
Of course, not every ticket I've opened gets favorable action: nofollow is still a fundamental part of the core code, even though it's a largely useless "solution" to a very real problem.
/wp-content/directory was not writable, and the error message was not sufficiently instructive. Patch forthcoming. I understand why you're using a unqiue backup destination directory, but the requirements to support this arguably go against the published guidelines for file permissions. An overly permissive/wp-content/could too easily allow abuse in the themes and plugins directories. Perhaps you could create the unique directory inside/wp-content/backup/...