As reported here on the Virtual Earth blog there was a new release of Virtual Earth recently. Normally interim releases wouldn't be very interesting but there's some new functionality that I requested a while back and I'm thrilled that its now in there.
Namely, you can now measure the distance of routes. This is really useful if, for example, you go for a daily run or bike ride and want to know how far you've been. Observe:

[Click through on the map to get the full Virtual Earth navigation experience]
Equally as cool, as you're drawing the route you get a tooltip showing distance so far:

I think that's really useful and, therefore, really cool. Virtual Earth continues to leave Google Maps standing yet still everyone is still using Google. Perhaps Microsoft need to start shouting louder about it?
-Jamie