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Okay, first off I have to appologize. I said some pretty harsh things about the new Monster Manual when I first bought it, about how it's all statblocks and no flavor. As I've perused it more closely, it turns out that while there's some really nice flavor there--it's just a lot more tightly written and packed mostly into the lore section. But rather than gush in vague and general ways about "all the stuff" I like--I thought I'd start with one I was just rereading that I particularly like.
The yuan-ti.
They're their own thing now, an ancient prehistoric civilization that venerates the god Zehir, evil patron of poison and serpents. Their civilization collapsed when their rulers, the huge creatures that have come to be known as anathemas, went insane and began to devour their followers to great effect. Their world fell apart and made room for younger races to rise. The yuan-ti seek to retake the world a bit at a time, working with human cultists who revere Zehir and see the yuan-ti as favored manifestations of his will--a great first society that deserves a rebirth. The ruck and run of the yuan-ti are human-sized malisons, snake heads with either legs or snake tails. Abominations are bigger (large size), meaner versions of the malison, champions of their kind with the thickest armor and biggest weapons. The anathemas are kept in unaccessable pits, carved with holy snake motiffs with chutes for dropping sacrifices down to keep them sated and passified. While the yuan-ti see their anathemas as holy, they fear them and that were they released that they would become a scourge to the world--bent on devouring all life. So they're conflicted, driven to feed and serve them, while charting an independant course for their kind.
I like that yuan-ti are finally their own thing. They were always tied to humanity--an "ancient civilization" somewhere that decided to turn themselves into snake people because snakes are cool and powerful. It was always pretty vague, and it seemed weird that a historical event of that magnitude was copy-pasted into every D&D setting. Plus it was weird how they liked to mutate people, or turn people into mindslaves by making them drink magic poison. The old castes were a little odd too, with the snake-hands guys, and the naga looking guys, and the near human guys. The coolest of the bunch, the hybrids, were pretty much always relegated to the up front dungeon hacks--since they were pretty much the fighter caste.
The new story puts them right up front as the archtypal "yuan-ti". The new storyline takes the old idea about yuan-ti infested ruins where they sacrifice humans and makes it make a load more sense (they've presumably trapped an anathema there and are feeding it). Likewise the humans who work for these new yuan-ti aren't just dupes or brainwashees. They are folks who venerate a god and want to see the return of the golden age of their god's rule in the world, the renewal of an empire older than mankind--and far from treating their human cohorts as pawns, they seem to actually respect them. You wonder if a return of the yuan-ti empire wouldn't even be maybe kind of a cool thing--because they aren't always painted as a bunch of meglomaniacal jerks.
I really love the Yuan-ti and plan on using them as the main bad guys in my new 4E campaign.
They'll definitely make a big appearance in one of my campaigns, consuming the late heroic and most of the paragon (if not all of it). Its pretty darn easy to create monsters of differing levels, and I can easily make some epic yaun-ti, or even reduce a few to heroic level, but I think that I'd like to have some undead and beetle infested pyramids thrown in the mix, perhaps with some efreet as the epic threat.