I'm seeing a lot of hate here, but I think this is a good decision. I know what a pain it is to support older versions of IE because I was doing it before jQuery came onto the scene. They took a lot of that pain from us and hoisted it onto themselves, but we can't expect them to carry that burden forever.

My company dropped IE 7 support months ago, I look forward to the day we can drop IE 8. We'll probably be suck with jQuery 1.9 for a while, but my side projects will start using 2.0 right away.