Rumored features of Android 4.2 include:

1. Huge improvements to Google Now, cards will be different, a card comparing how much you’ve walked across months and a card that pops up when ever you go to a new city, showing all the POI’s and distance to them
2. Notifications get further improvements, now you can read entire messages in the notification center
3. UI improvements for bigger tablets
4. The keyboard will come with something similar to Swype
5. Profiles feature is coming for the tablets, not sure about the phone
6. Google will introduce ‘Content in the center,’ which will allow users to access Play Store content from a widget
7. Panoramic camera settings will be updated to support both horizontal and vertical movement by default

source

Home Screen Show off time 

July



August



September



October


NOW


   

Yup, the implementation in the kernel level still in alpha stage. Although kernel developer can include all the necessary drivers but it needs additional files in the ROM as well to make it work especially the alsa config part.

Anyway, why not using an audio processor for the time being.. 

Did you use only the app downloaded from Play store or the Nexus Louder mod? I use the latter and so far the volume behave as expected.