Why ZFS is exciting technology

In thinking about using ZFS under either Fuse/Linux or Nexenta/Solaris I think it's important to note why ZFS is of interest compared to the numerous other upcoming filesystems. I think, for me, what is attractive about ZFS are certain aspects of functionality such as checksumming and filesystem-based snapshots as well as the common set of tools for disk maintenance. While MD and LVM are great pieces of software, their tools are not always the best in my opinion. Although mdadm may be a step up from its predecessors it's not what I would consider intuitive. However, this is all theoretical as I have not actually used ZFS yet. And the servers I build and maintain will continue to be MD/LVM/Ext3 for some time I'm sure.