Just from here and there. Some pointers here:
Back after a 3 weeks vacation to India day before early morning, totally jet lagged… 
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What are you waiting for? There’s echo integration and hub 2 madness waiting.
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I am brain dead right now to do anything. echo integration, v2 preorder, kuna lights arriving this Saturday… Darn! Missus is literally dragging me around the house as I am so darn jet lagged…
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Z-wave plus is the newest generation in zwave. Lots of improvements.
The zwave piece itself is smaller, which means sensors and other devices including it can be smaller, but it also means less power draw.
Along with some other energy management improvements, this should mean for example that battery life is longer. They were really trying to go for a two-year battery life on a Z wave plus door lock. We’ll have to see if they really got there, but they are a lot closer than the previous generation.
Range has been improved pretty significantly. That will help a lot, not just with the actual range, but with the quality of the mesh since it means devices will have more routes available then they had previously, because each device can talk to a wider selection of Other nodes. Fingers crossed, but this may also mean Fewer lost or delayed messages.
Transmission time from the hub to a node will be faster.
It will now be possible to do firmware updates over the air if the device is also Z wave plus and is set up to do that. That’s a nice feature.
There are also some network-management improvements which you won’t see but you will see the results of.
So better battery life, longer-range, faster transmission, over the air firmware update, smaller physical device size, lower energy draw, and a bunch of network-management improvements . All good.
This is why I said I personally would upgrade from V1 to V2 even if the only difference was that V2 was zwave plus. 
it’s also why almost all zwaveproduct manufacturers except the really really low end ones will be coming out with new device lines over the next 18 months that shift to Z wave plus.
The previous generation devices will still work fine, so you could have a network that mixes and matches generations. But you need the primary controller to be zwave plus to get full benefits.
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How can the antenna be smaller when the frequency is the same? Electrical antenna length is dictated by the wavelength of the signal (which is the same, isn’t it?)
While there are hundreds of “tricks” to make an antenna physically smaller (without making it electrically smaller), they nearly all result in a loss of efficiency - which would result in a shorter range (or greater power draw due to required amplification.)
Terminology, it’s not the antenna piece, it’s what most engineers would call the radio. I don’t like to use the term radio because it confuses people in this context. But there’s a physical difference in the package that gets included in the device in order to give it z-wave capabilities. This is most obvious in the micro relays.
Your an engineer, dammit. Say what you mean. 
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Apparently Amazon’s Echo marketing beat you to it. Pre-order is in. Alexa is waiting.
With google coming out with Onhub in a few weeks im gonna wait and see what it is capable of. I for one am pretty annoyed that local processing is not possible on the V1 hub. i don’t believe it is underpowered and there seems to be enough memory to at least to store a few things… Heck id be happy if we could set onlu 1 or 2 programs to run locally on v1 hub or even better release a smart things server OS that we can install on a pc in our home network to act like the cloud controllers to do local processing on site… have a primary and secondary system kind of like dns…
Thanks JD, good explanation, much appreciated.
From what I’ve read, Google ohHub does not support Z-wave. Only the most popular format out there for Home automation. Genius…
Just announced the support for Echo!
Does your fiance know?
I want to purchase a smart things system for the first time. Should I wait until the new devices come out along with hub v2? Should I preorder hub v2 now and buy the other devices (open/close, moisture, etc) when they are released. Thanks?
I would say preorder as soon as you can to ensure you get it quicker as we are not sure how fast they will go. You can order from the SmartThings shop or Amazon at the moment.
Thank you. I am in the same boat