Java 6 Standard Edition has been released and can be downloaded here. The long winded version of what’s new can be read here, while the summary of new features and changes can be found here.
Personally I don’t know if I’ll be working on anything in 1.6 anytime soon as 1.5 is still the current standard for non-J2EE Java, but I wouldn’t be surprised to be using it in production by next Summer or so. Although I still think “wtf” about them including Derby as part of the standard release.
Of the things that should be in there from Apache rather than Derby would be most everything which is currently in Apache Commons as it seems like pretty much every Java project needs a good 4-5 Apache Commons libraries.
Now I’m sure all of my Java RSS feeds will be populated with Sun employees talking about how cool NetBeans and Java 6 is, which of course only further motivates me to stick with Eclipse and Java 5. 
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In all honesty, most of the Java 6 enhancements are aimed at the desktop. There are a lot of jvm improvements and bug fixes (as with each release), but the “groundbreaking” stuff is almost all gui work. It’s not like 5, which brought big changes to the language itself.
LOL at the Derby thing. I had the same question myself. I went to RMSS and they had a preview of 1.6 in one of the sessions. I think he had some sort of explanation (in the tradition of NFJS, he’s not from Sun or anything) of Derby - something along the lines of making it similar to other languages for people to start doing the db development. Eh, whatever. I’ll stick with Hani - I believed he biled that little nugget ages ago.
Regarding Netbeans vs. Eclipse, one of the guys on the Java Posse podcast mentioned using both and I find that to be useful. I fire up NetBeans for Matisse (Swing dev) and use Eclipse for everything else. Of course, I also use both Vim and Emacs, so I’m sick that way, I guess.
BTW, have you seen EasyEclipse?