The latest Gimp release has several new improvements that make it more comparable to Adobe Photoshop.

Gimpusers has a great summary of new features and enhancements with Gimp 2.4.

The UI is a little cleaner, and now uses the “Tango-style” icons present on most operating systems.

The selection tool has been cleaned up a bit.

Text-to-path has been improved, allowing for curved text and shaping.

Preview in plugins and filters has been improved to allow for panning and zooming.

Color picker has been changed to allow a spot-pick from anywhere on the screen (not just the current image in Gimp).