But seriously, WordCamp is coming soon and all of the Automattic crew will be there. I'm sure I'll be buying drinks for some of the many people who have contributed to WP and made it so successful. If you've had a patch land in WP, mention your changeset or ticket number for a free beer on me.

$wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");

That will not work in WP 2.1 because there is no longer a linkcategories table. Link categories now live in the categories table along with post categories. If you use the API, you won't notice the difference. Themes that do the SELECT shown above will need to add some compatibility code if they want to support both 2.1 and versions prior to 2.1. Example:

if ( function_exists('wp_list_bookmarks') ) {
	wp_list_bookmarks('arg1=x&arg2=y');
} else {
	$cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
	...
}

If your theme uses the get_links_list() function you are safe and don't need to do anything to your theme. If you are doing something custom that involves direct SELECTs from the database, however, look into the new bookmarks API. get_bookmarks() and wp_list_bookmarks() are still under development but are coming along nicely. If you are testing 2.1 alpha, try them out in your theme and help us shake out the bugs.