In The New York Times article on this big announcement, Dennis Overbye makes it sound kind of like an event in the Exoplanet Olympics:

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In a terse statement, Dr. Mayor’s main rivals, a group of planet hunters led by Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said they were doing their own survey, to be completed within a year.

“Our survey will check the Swiss report that 30 percent of stars have super-Earths or Neptunes orbiting closer than Mercury does the Sun,” the group said in an e-mail message.
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I’m really curious about HD 181433, which is apparently a K giant. Its inner planet is on a much tighter orbit than the planets of the “retired A stars” that John Johnson and others have been finding. But I don’t find any data on its mass, which would indicate what its main sequence spectral type might have been. I guess we’ll find out whenever the discovery papers appear.

Also, it is just me, or do hot Jupiter systems seem to be single (HD209458, 51 Peg, etc.), while hot Neptune systems seem to be in multiples (these systems, GJ 876, GJ 581, etc.). There is an observational bias here (transiting systems – the source of hot Jupiters these days – don’t have enough observations to detect more distant planets), but I’m starting to wonder if this ties in to the core accretion / migration process, perhaps related to Greg’s conjection about a mass valley. On the super-massive (> 2 M_J) end, heavy planets are the only close-in planets with detectable eccentricities (WASP-10, WASP-14 being recent examples) which might be telling us about eccentricity evolution due to tides or other interesting physics.

Just goes to show you that detecting ~300 planets doesn’t mean we’ve found all the interesting trends yet.