A very minor point in the list of new APIs was this one:
Interesting. They didn’t have this feature before? Apple seems to realize that every weapon they give to developers, even if it’s just an optimized API for something you could also implement on your own, is another selling point against Android. Because Google can’t optimize that deeply: Android is polymorph, and hardware-level fine tuning is a lot of work. Or money, that is. Windows 7 and the other systems will have to fight the same uphill battle.
Having really fast text pattern matching on a mobile device is a feature in itself. Keep in mind that even the iPad is still an order of magnitude behind on raw processing power compared to current laptops. Everything can become a bottleneck in the iPhone OS world.
By the way: CodeRay for iPhone OS, anyone? :D Regular expressions are the core of every good syntax highlighter.