The guys above answered the "where's the beef" question pretty good. I'll add just another note on this. When deciding features, I have a long list of requests, go through the feature request forum and make some decisions.
1) I'll usually pick a couple major ones that will take awhile or require a large bit of code to be rewritten. For 7.1, that was CAPTCHA and the multiple language option.
2) I'll then tackle a couple of things that the feature already exists but needs to be tweaked or made better. For 7.1, it was active topics, deleting posts, banning users, moved topics, ignored users, and a couple more.
3) Then I'll add a few small features. These are usually ones that have been on the wishlist the longest or have the most frequent requests. For 7.1, one of those was an actual online indicator next to each post. That was a feature that was requested many moons ago and came up from time to time because product x or y had it and we didn't. I decided to expand on this a bit and make moods tie into the online indicator to make them a bit more multipurpose.
And that's about the extent of it. You get some new major features, some improvements to existing features, and some new minor features.
Some releases are going to be more exciting to some users than they are to others but I do try and get a couple things into each release that everyone can benefit from.
