It is force touch, basically.

Using capacitive touch sensors the iPhone6s measures the tiny flexing of the front screen as you touch it. Pretty clever actually.

Hardware-accelerated click-and-hold.

Tactile feedback and touch force recognition, so Force Touch for iphones.

Seems to me it allows something like hover states on mobile.

I'd love to see the lightest, regular swipe and tap act as a mouse on-rollover hover state and the slightly harder swipe scroll the page.

The harder press would be the on-press and on-release states.

I miss all of those interaction states, with multi-touch.

Not only will Apple not do that, but we won't even have the options to do so. It'll be all about new, gimmicky peek and poke style gestures. I'm sure they'll be nice, though.

Right click for touchscreens.

Fancy context menus.

No more home button in iPhone 7?

Theoretically it means that the screen senses pressure in addition to location(s) (note that all capacitive screens do this already, where pressure is proxied by size of touch, which is useful with big meaty fingers but is arguably less precise. Android publishes this, since version 1.0, as "force"). The demos are a little odd, though, as all seem to be primarily about the difference between taps and long presses, being entirely defined by touch time rather than pressure.