well.
after watching those vids i gotta say it's not that a surprise.
sure, the integration into maya is done great, but the question left open stays: what's the great advantage...
rendering times ? it doesn't look much like that would be a real factor when watching those vids ... (well, texture baking, but i want to see that working with multi-million-poly-scenes !)
* * *
and the most frustrating is that all the state-of-the-art biasing settings are there. tweaking dozens of parameters like depthmap shadow resolutions, highlight-sizes, ray-counts for raytracing makes me think i'm happy with maxwell... at least for some time.