The sculpt brush now has falloff control. This is set using a curve control in the Brush panel. By default, the brush has the same shape as in 2.45.
New brush texture control that rotates the texture to follow the direction of the stroke (original patch by Ian Calvert.) Can be enabled by pressing the Rake button in the Sculpt Texture palette.
When using brushes with texturing enabled, the texture is now applied with bilinear filtering. This results in a much smoother brush stroke. (Note that there is no user control for this; it's done by default.)
The new brush option Anchored keeps the center of the brush fixed during a stroke, and the brush grows larger or smaller to follow the mouse. If a texture is applied, the brush is also rotated to follow the mouse. Good for brushing alphas on to the mesh. (Note that this option isn't available for the grab brush, and ignores the smooth stroke option.)