The previous RPi did actually have hardware FP, see http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/545/does-the-.... I think the arch support is probably the big issue - any standard Linux distro with an armhf port will work on the new RPi. Probably gets you access to a lot more interesting Debian packages than you did with Raspbian.
Thanks for the correction. I recalled the original release of debian for the Pi didn't have floating point support, but did not recall that that was because Debian was building towards the least common denominator. I don't think you'd get that many more interesting packages with the new arch, but you probably will get a lot more usability out of the packages
