DeathandTaxes thanks for the explanations. It was very informative and helpful. When do you think the fees will actually be 0.01mBTC (I know technically they are now but in practice they arent) or in other words when will the critical mass updatte the clients so I can take advantage of this new fee structure..
Kinda hard to predict. You can create a tx with a 0.01 mBTC fee per KB right now using createrawtransaction API call. Any tx with a 0.01 mBTC per KB fee will be dropped by v0.8x nodes and relayed by v0.9x nodes.
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/dashboard/ Acording to this ~40% of nodes are running v0.9x so it is very likely any tx sent w/ lower fee will get a miner. You can also compile a custom version of the client which adds that support now.
There probably will be sufficient coverage for the next version of the client to support the lower fees in new transactions although the core client isn't updated that often (usually 3 to 6 months).