An Xbox 360 Falcon of today compared to the Falcon which is what everyone knows.
5-10W reduced power consumption. As the process/yields have improved, the voltage required to run each chip has dropped and therefore the local "hot spots" on the GPU and CPU would be reasonably cooler and therefore the heat cycle stress would be a lot lower.
They have tweaked the design of the motherboard to remove 4 of the ram chips on the back side, which were one of the sources of failure and they've done numerous tweaks to the capacitors etc, most likely all in the name of reliability.
The new drives are quieter, probably more reliable and you have the option of installing games to the HDD and therefore eliminate the noise completely and extend the life of the drive.
So pretty much if you're worried about the reliability, just wait till black friday and pick one up with the lot number (Last 5 digits of the serial number) so at least 839(2 digits but doesn't matter)X+ from the serial number which you can view by looking through the slit on the back of the outer box. If you can't don't worry but I figure it pays to have the latest revision.
Tease.
