I've bundled vala and libgee into Extras-devel using mud, and will promote them to Extras - after some further testing - hopefully this weekend along with a simple demo app.

Personally, I'm quite excited about Vala for the tablets: the advantages of a high-level language (like C#, Java or Python) with none of the downsides.

IDE support would be good, but there are plugins for GEdit which help with internal navigation.