InfoQ.com have a great interview with Gavin King on their site discussing the new features and changes in Seam 1.1.
Most interesting I think is the option to no longer be reliant on EJB3 Entity Beans as the backing beans for the JSF pages, but instead use plain POJOs – a feature that allows you to deploy a Seam based app without a dependency on an EE App Server. More details in this blog entry here.