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Xfce 4.8 Released
PerlDudeXL writes "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions."
Actually dropping HAL for PolicyKit/ConsoleKit/udev makes it considerably lighter in that regard. HAL has always been a beast of a system that got so unwieldy to maintain and fix that they started dismantling it years ago. As far as ThunarVFS vs GIO, I'm not sure, but it shouldn't be much different and at least reduces the amount of code around that duplicates functions, this should at least make your system itself lighter (unless you've got nothing but XFCE apps on your system, in which case there shouldn't be a change).
...between functionality and bloat. I have not used it as my primary desktop environment, but I do sometimes install it when I want a reasonably full-featured desktop in a VM without causing the size of the VM disk image to balloon too much.
For a truly minimalist lightweight desktop, LXDE seems to be showing a lot of promise.
ThunarVFS isn't new, it's one of the things they've replaced and removed.
From the Xubuntu blog: "The new version of Xfce is scheduled to be included in Xubuntu 11.04, to be released in April of this year."
I am guessing from your post that you run Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives. Xfce on Ubuntu is not much better than Gnome, becaue Ubuntu packs a lot of stuff in to their Xfec impleimenation besides Xfce. Ubuntu, is not a distribution you want to use for a memory constrained or slow CPU system.
However, if you run Xfce on Debian, Fedora, Arch, etc. it simply flies and uses fewer resources than gnome.