In a recent post on the vSphere PowerCLI Blog, called New Nested Properties for Navigating to Parent Objects in PowerCLI 4.1, some new features were introduced.
In PowerCLI 4.1 some objects now have, besides the ParentId property, the actual parent object itself. This will take quite some complexity out of several scripts. This is definitely a good improvement.
The 2nd novelty in that post were nested properties. Some SDK object properties are now mapped directly in the PowerCLI object. For example the VMHost object now holds the StorageInfo and NetworkInfo properties besides some others. And what is even better, there is hardly any performance impact since the values will only be loaded the first time you access the properties (similar to the ExtensionData property).