At ArsTechnica, in "Open Ended", Ryn Paul talks about Python 3.0 first alpha. He shows an install trouble he had (I'm almost sure he is not using make altinstall), and focuses the rest of his article on Python 3.0 new string formatting features (more about it in the new ReST docs).

I like the way PEP 3101 is now: the formatting language is only complex when you want to do complex things :), and we dont need a complete programming language inside strings.

I hope a 2to3 fixer could translate the most commom uses of %-interpolation to .format(), but I'm not sure that old-style interpolation will be removed from Py3k. For an example, if the string on the left is not a literal, it is not possible to translate with a 2to3 fixer.