Google has a new engine, Caffine, and the press goes crazy. In non spammed out areas, Google is pretty good. They want to cover more and expand their coverage, terrific. They aren’t going to dramatically shift results, and people focused on content oriented sites instead of spamming Google should do fine.
However, the Internet has expanded rapidly, content has moved into walled gardens like Facebook and semi-open Twitter, so Google needs a new engine. I don’t see a fundamental change to Google’s thought process happening, as they still analyze content and links for relevancy, even as they’ve gotten trickier.
We could see some shake outs, but most likely, Google will still provide relatively relevant results and focus on fighting spam. But to SEO “experts” < 25, this is probably a huge deal.