I still don't know why storyboards (all views and segues) are implemented in a single file. I talked to some Apple developers at WWDC last year and this year about the issue. I explained the possibility of actually saving controller/view bindings in separate files (umm, xibs) so you wouldn't get all these conflicts. The storyboard itself would only be a graph of the xibs and their segues to other xibs and whatnot (position on screen in the editor or whatever). A lot less of a chance of a conflict. I'm just giving a high level overview of what we had discussed. I still think it could be implemented better. Break that bad boy up! It should be in a bundle.
This is a welcome change. I'm interested to see if storyboards are now team-friendly too.
They always have been. The new XIB format is the same as the current Storyboard format.
It doesn't completely prevent merge conflicts though.