Curious mind wants to know, has anyone discovered the power of 2D tool’s as GUI?
I played around with it. And now I can draw,
1.All gui elements with just one drawcall(unless your GUI is too big to fit on atlas 
;))
2.Animated gui elements aka animated button etc, even in pause menu.
I am curious about one thing, normal mapping, refraction etc. Right now I have no clue for it.
And I gone this far:p:p,
I feel stupid that this didn’t even cross my mind when 2d came to Unity (officially), but this is brilliant!
Not only it came to my mind, but seriously considering wrapping my GUI system around it once it is completely finished (I have actually prepared everything for this shift; separated the actual GUI logic from the renderer etc.).
Right now, the 2D system is missing 2 very important things for a low-level GUI system:
Another thing that I find not so great is that the automatic atlas thing is reserved for Pro users only. I hope they’ll change that.
Sprites are actually the tectonic shift in how Unity works with 2D.
If I remember correctly, we can do masking/clipping through stencil buffer(Though details about it, is out of my knowledge right now. And I have heard, it is pro only 
)
And for atlasing, I think I can manage it through external paint program easily. I think we can achieve nice n juicy thing through runtime atlasing.
Anyway, my biggest concern regarding GUI design, was drawcall. Now with 2D tools, batching is out of the box 
Are you sure that stencils are Pro only?
This means that the new GUI system would also miss clipping in the free version.
Hate to break you, it is pro only. http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses, See on the graphics section. As we cannot write any rendering code from native plugin(android-ios) either, it is ultimately unavailable. I actually kinda emulate it, with “discard” command, for some GUI effects.
Too bad. Because a GUI system that couldn’t be used with Unity Free is of no use.
This partition between Pro and not Pro is really harmful for native plugins.
Please, help us to change it
http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/allow-native-code-plugins-for-un
We could all agree on that.
However, this was known from the start and I guess the reason (for not offering plugin features to Free users) lies in their profit. Perhaps the Unity logo (watermark) isn’t a good enough reason for Unity user to go Pro, so they left some of the features unlocked.
(btw this is the reason for a big success of NGUI because they did their custom rendering that works with Unity Free)
What I’m really concerned about is locking parts of the 2D workflow for Free users. Because all of that could be done without the sprite thing (using quads).
I’m tempted to eventually roll my own rendering solution, but still waiting to see what happens with stencils (maybe it’s only a temporary decision).
I’m also interested to see how the "New new GUI "works with Unity Free (because if stencils are locked, it would mean that the old GUI system was more usable).