This post is for the benefit of anyone who had the displeasure of using Netbeans 5.0 that came with OpenSuse 10.3 .
The first thing to say is that netbeans does take a little while to load, which is a shame really because it looks like they missed the opportunity to show off javas threading abilities. The other downer is that it eats alot of ram 
you’ll want at least a gig to run netbeans and happily get on with your other desktop tasks (music, word processing etc)
After the load, the fun stuff!
The best thing to say is that the web container integration works really well. It comes with glassfish as a standard, but you can add many different different verions of tomcat ontop if you prefer that. It makes deploying your servlets or jsps as easy as hiting F6 (which runs you main project, remember to select your project as main first!) . You can change where netbeans deploys the servlet by right clicking on the project and going to properties. Once in properties you can go down to run and select your server 
Of course, you will need to have the server running first!
IMO the best update for the editor is the code highlighting, particularly the instant rename. You can basically out the caret in the middle of a word and hit <ctrl> + R The editor then selects every other instance of that word in the file and changes it as you change the currently selected one accordingly.