Angular 2 preview introduces components as the fundamental building block and embraces upcoming standards like Web Components. Key changes include defining components with annotations instead of controllers and services, using templates with new binding syntax instead of directives, and compiling to ES5 with TypeScript for static typing. Many Angular 1 directives are no longer needed in Angular 2 which aims to simplify the framework and improve performance. The new version is not yet stable and some features like the router were demonstrated but too unstable to show in detail.