As Zope's component architecture solidifies, the CMF will be migrated to it. The CMF will continue to develop separately from Zope. This will allow it to evolve without being bound by the Zope release cycle. The CMF will likely become a very important part of Zope since we are focusing much of our consulting work on it. The major architectural change planned for Zope is the move to a component model.
Components are pluggable, reusable, and persistent code modules.
In developer terms, components are objects with interfaces. Components will only talk to each other using methods defined in interfaces. Components need not be as heavy weight as current Zope products. Components need not be persistent, nor provide a management interface. This will allow you to use components for all kinds of tasks, without having a lot of overhead.