Personally I think they messed up the backup function. The backup does happen much faster but does this by not backing up the applications or music or movies.
I'm in the process of testing a restore and it is now installing the apps. Problem is, it's installing all the apps not just the ones I had active. It has also defaulted to installing all my music, not my selected play list. It didn't restore any of my data for my apps (not even the data for notepad).
This is being done on my touch since my phone update will need to wait for Friday.
So how are we expected to backup application data?