Given it a more substantial go now and... yeah, underwhelming as all fuck.
What this game needs most is: more block types/processes/stuff to make.
Yeah lots more interesting things to craft would be good. Things like the pistons were a nice addition and fairly interesting.
I really like 1.8's terrain generation (although I can't find any fucking snow). The ravines and mountains and rivers all make it even more lovely than it already was. The combat change and stuff are all quite cool too but unfortunately catering to a different type of player than the peaceful hippies of Teh. :(
Should make a special chest (8 wood + 1 redstone) inside which you can layout redstone circuits, and then if you place the chest on a workbench and combine it with sticky stuff and whatever then it produces a custom circuit-in-a-box, so people can condense all those stupidly large circuits into a few squares, and thus enable some insane sorts of contraptions to be made from the results.
Aye, I've said that many many times.
Say it louder and towards Sweden so Notch hears and does something about it.
Yes, integrated circuits! (dance)
And maybe some means of having wires go vertically more than 1 block.
And some way of rotating blocks - having a redstone powered windmill or roundabout would open up all sorts of possibilities.
On a similar theme, some sort of gears system would be grand.
I was thinking along similar lines recently - with rotating blocks, and some way to make the rotate at a given speed, all sorts of mechanical things could be made!
The main issue I can see is that, well, everything's a cube, and I'm guessing it'd take a fairly substantial rewrite of the basic game engine to allow for rotation.
Alternatively, like graphitone said, some sort of gears system might work if the gears were entirely contained within blocks. Hmm....