Chet Haase's recent blog entry "Consumer JRE: Leaner, Meaner Java" sketches a thorough overview of what we can expect of the "Consumer JRE". An excellent read!
Next to that I also found Augusto Sellhorn's blog entry, which offers some more specifics on the installation experience and the upcoming Javascript API. He had the chance to attend the JavaOne "Easy Deployment Is Finally Here" talk by Dennis Gu and Ethan Nicholas.
Now if only the guys at Sun realized what they missed.
PS: Let's hope the JavaOne sessions will become available online soon. This talk looks promising (among others).