Okay folks, the fruition of a ton of intense work:
New in SDL 0.6j:
Much cleaner separation of OS dependent portion -- easy to port
Completely rewritten video/surface API -- see SDL_video.h
Much better blit hardware acceleration support
Added thread-safe locking on surfaces
Added precalculated alpha blending acceleration
SDL_BlitSurface() has been split into layers for the brave
Added function to return current time in milliseconds
New event type SDL_ACTIVEEVENT, to detect iconification
New event type SDL_SYSWMEVENT, for custom window hooks
Added a platform dependent function to get window handle
Added a function to check the run-time version of SDL
Added initial support for SDL_DEBUG environment variable
Miscellaneous internal cleanups
The biggest change is … everything but the audio. 
Bang on it! Break it!
The API has been changed a bit, so take a look at the test programs
to see what’s possible now. The biggest changes are that the surface
lock doesn’t return a surface anymore and some functions have been
extended.