The chaps over at DriverHeaven have their thoughts and impressions on DirectX 10 and how it will impact gaming and video card usage as we know it. Here's an excerpt:

DirectX 10 also allows new abilities for the developer such as morphing so expect to see monsters changing shape. Another new feature is the ability to get the graphics card to handle physics instead of the CPU, which can significantly allow more objects to be interacted with and making games more realistic. ATI showed off a demo a while ago which showed off an ocean where the wave physics were entirely done on the GPU rather than the CPU so expect more games to use this type of feature in the future.