AMD announces new OpenCL programming tools

The debugger requires Visual Studio, bummer.

gDEBugger was a cross platform opengl/opencl debugger before amd bought them. I am surprised/disappointed to see them offer only a windows version.

Task Manager API: A framework to manage scheduling kernels across devices

This makes me wonder... how useful is the GPU for kernel development?

If you mean OS Kernels, rather than OpenCL kernels as snippyhollow pointed, you might want to look at http://code.google.com/p/kgpu/

AMD's GPU support for Linux has always been spotty. How much does this depend on their hardware drivers?

Wait, wasn't Microsoft's OpenCL alternative DirectCompute?