WordPress 3.3 introduces admin pointers, which basically are highlights to show how various things work. This will be great for the core features obviously, but where it can really make things easier is in plugins and themes doing fancy stuff no one’s seen before.

The nice folks on Theme.fm have a post on admin pointers, which you should read if you’re interested in how you’ll be doing them, although you need to remember that 3.3 is still under development. They also put together this awesome video detailing how it could work.