I missed it Cross-Object Owner Formulas

Summer '13 has a long awaited feature of mine - Cross-Object Owner Formulas.  As a developer, I can't count the number of times that I have written a trigger on objects for clients to populate a custom user lookup so they could use it in formula fields.  Almost every sObject has the owner field but it's polymorphic, meaning it can point to a queue or user. This presented Salesforce.com with a problem in their data model using formulas.  For instance, if Salesforce.com allowed you to reference Owner.FirstName and the owner was a queue, you would receive a runtime exception. Now there is native support for using cross-object formulas for all Owner fields.  The syntax is slightly different than normal.  For instance, the syntax to show a custom field from the User object would be Owner:User.MyCustomField__c.  You can also determine if the record is owned by a queue in a validation rule ISBLANK(Owner:User.Id).