Don Box and Chris Anderson went through Entity Framework and the new stuff that has improved the developer experience. For instance you can use Entity Framework and still use IDataReader etc getting the data so you may start migrating from SqlConnection to Entity Framework without committing entirely. That and that you could use your own classes instead of the dal-style generated classes makes this customizable in very powerful way like in a wcf service environment. That and that it looks more nicer.

They also addressed the never ending story about where the framework should be modeled (database, definitions file, C# code) and the answer is ... the way you like it :). It all depends on where the model origins, for an instance if you have an existing database it will be hard to make another model in code.

They also showed the entity framewark talking with Share Point over OData(!) where they could access the data via and atom feed and manipulate that data directly in the share point server. I really have to look into odata!