Scott Dickens of Microsoft presented on "Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8".

• Main action item is to check and ensure your sites work on Internet Explorer 8.0 since it will be standards compliant by default
• It is a good decision Microsoft has taken now by making IE 8 default to strict standards mode, you need to over-ride it for IE 7 mode. This can be done by having in your pages a meta tag <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />. You can also do this at the entire site level by including in IIS Header tag which can be overwritten at page level as well
• IE 8 includes great Typographic foundation
• A new layout engine was built with CSS 2.1 spec in hand, Deprecation of hasLayout
• When there are ambiguities in the CSS spec, the idea is to check with working group, see what other browsers are doing

More features on readiness can be seen here and a complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.