For one thing, a method service management that does not just fire off commands but monitors services and restarts them if they fail. Also, doing this with an idea of dependencies of services.
Event-based service management is interesting, too, e.g. shutting down a network service when the machine is disconnected from the network and restarts them when a connection becomes available again (think NTP, DHCP clients).
Once you have an idea of how services depend on each other, you get the ability to start services in parallel for free (whether that is so useful or even a good idea is another question).
Given the fact that systemd is hardly the first attempt to solve these issues (think SMF on Solaris, launchd on OS X, or the couple of attempts on GNU/Linux), I think a lot of people have felt the itch to improve on the classical SysV init.
Event-based service management is interesting, too, e.g. shutting down a network service when the machine is disconnected from the network and restarts them when a connection becomes available again (think NTP, DHCP clients).
Once you have an idea of how services depend on each other, you get the ability to start services in parallel for free (whether that is so useful or even a good idea is another question).
Given the fact that systemd is hardly the first attempt to solve these issues (think SMF on Solaris, launchd on OS X, or the couple of attempts on GNU/Linux), I think a lot of people have felt the itch to improve on the classical SysV init.