What I'm really hoping for is that with the advent of Core Image, Adobe will finally have some serious competition on it's hands. Smaller companies able to take advantage of the tools that Core Image offers, *will* make a program that does better than any version of Photoshop. I won't say that it'll will do everything better than Photoshop, it will most likely start out as one or two things. But that crack is all there needs to be for the flood to come rushing in.
Suppose for instance you need to do some different burning/dodging effects and PS just can't do it as well as you'd like; well you open up that new freeware dodge/burn program port the image into there, do the work you've always wanted to do, and bam, it's done.
Third party stuff is out there already that does better jobs than PS, take Grain Surgery or Noise Ninja for example. Imagine what could be done with Core Image using just about any other tool. I'm looking forward to instantaneous color/hue/contrast adjustments, using that nice GPU I'm getting.
I don't want to bash Photoshop and say something stupid like "it's terrible at everything", because that would be a lie. Photoshop is an incredible tool, the best out there in fact, and I've been using it for years. I just think that they need competition. They're too expensive (perhaps prohibitively expensive in some cases), and sometimes it feels like they're just being lazy.
Bring on Core Image!