Typography plays a large role in this trend as well, although not as prominently. You'll notice the heavy use of sans serif fonts, although some examples (Medium sticks out in my mind) have nicely used serif fonts for body copy. Larger line heights and font-sizes (18px+ for base font size and line heights between 1.2 and 1.5 em) utilize white space well to make the design seem less compact - an excellent practice, because without other cues for depth, the flat visuals can look quite cramped.
I would advise creating a dummy page and playing with these different styles. This trend is great for learning by doing, rather than learning by recreating (you don't need to get that perfect gradient to pull the design together). Tools like color.hailpixel.com can help you pull your color scheme together, and resources such as Symbolset.com can provide nice icon fonts that will tie your flat design together. You can also download the "What Font" extension to Chrome (do they have one for Firefox too?) to see the dominent fonts being used in these designs. I've been seeing Lato (http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lato) pop up a lot recently.
Anyway, best of luck!