These guys have been around forever, but if you look closely, this does seem to be news...
First off, they seem to have 'quietly' become a full Linux distro, instead of a Window Manager ++. (If I recall, they used to be an 'OS' in the sense that, like Windows 3.x, you could load their system under Linux/X11 or Windows and run programs targeting the Athene API.*)
Secondly, the Athene component would now seem to be a full X11 replacement, built in a more 'conventional' sense (along the lines of Y or otherwise 'normal' systems, where the widget library comes built into the display server), using SNAP for accelleration, and implementing what sounds like a headless X server beneath... a-la Quartz or whatever Apple's calling it these days. [This is at first glance, so as caveat: If they simply took XFree86 or X.org and bunged SNAP onto it to take advantage of SciTech's optimized driver set, they could claim what they're claiming without having done anything especially sexy. In fact, it's not really clear what they're doing, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, whatever they *did* do, they could've achieved similar performance implementing Athene as an extension to X, which would easily guarantee the backwards compatibility... but hey, religious wars, commercial product, and if they actually took the time to implement and debug a completely new display server, maybe it really will be more 'user-friendly.'**]
*They've never been particularly clear about what they're doing, but taking a quick skim of the marketing, it (still) sounds pretty much like the Qt/KDE split... But reversed; Pandora seems to be about providing a minimal form of the conveniences and abstractions you'd get from things like KDE or Gnome libs ('media' support - just sound for now?, compression, some data type abstractions for clean coding?), while more of the Qt/GTK-style graphics calls and widgetry reside with the display server itself. [For that matter, my apologies if they were actually offering a full distro since 1998 or whenever they first showed up.]
**The 'problem' is, they're doing the old Trolltech business model one worse; not only is it less-than-open, but it costs the end-user money to become a convert. That'd be cool if you look at this as a commercial X server -- plenty of people pay upwards of $30 for the convenience of getting their graphics cards working when they can't figure out XFree86 or X.org -- but it's more than that; they're trying to push a whole new API here, so they'd stand to do much better making the whole Athene server free (so every user on the planet can become a potential target for developers licensing the SDK). But it's a DE-style catch-22; now that they've taken advantage of SNAP, they need to pay for it... and while I expect SciTech have brains and offer flat-fee licensing, how much do you want to bet that Rocklyte either cut a per-unit royalty deal, or feel the need to price that way just to recoup the expenditure (to avoid having to price the SDK out of the market, if most of their existing customers are likely to be 'embedded' shops pushing custom apps to relatively small numbers of desktops)?
