Besides the integration with Google Talk, orkut is about to have other new features. Here's what I found:
orkut SMS
With orkut SMS you can send and receive scraps with your mobile phone as well as other cool stuff. But first you need to register your mobile phone to use orkut.
Photo Tagging
You can tag your friends in photos. To create a photo tag, click and drag the mouse to select a friend.
I don't use orkut, so maybe someone who does could make an educated guess about these new features. Photo tagging might be useful to train a face recognition program, like Riya does, as you can see here.