A continuously updated WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about penalties, new sitelinks and more. WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, summed up what he is seeing in this thread and others.
There are two main things going on:
(1) Sites that have been ranking very well for years and years have noticed a major decline in rankings. Tedster said maybe "it's a new batch of the OOP (formerly called -950)." This might be related to the not real Google August 2009 update.
(2) Sitelinks have been changing. We are seeing anchored Sitelinks, many Sitelinks not in the top position, one line Sitelinks, four Sitelinks and even the standard eight Sitelinks. Tedster said, "It seems like the algo is getting more fine-tuned and in some cases at least is picking up more on popular internal pages that are not on the site's main menu."
That is a quick update on the state of the Google search index.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
