i agree, finally!
as far as real-time EQ goes, i am pretty sure that the standard audacity EQ will NOT work for this version (there are only a couple native audacity effects that support real-time at this stage)...however, any non-native, VST plugins or other plugins should work for real time (of which there are many). I tested real-time last night with the C3 Multi-band compressor plug-in and it worked perfectly.
If anyone can recommend a good free EQ plugin I would love to hear about it.
They also updated the look of the main front-end of Audacity...