half/half blocks and redstone powered blocks

there are 2 things here

1) half and half blocks, you can combine 2 blocks and make them into 1 block with half of each, example would be half bedrock and half sand.  This would allow you to build your house with 1 block layer for the walls instead of having to build 1 layer of the wall for the outside and having to build another layer for the inside.  This allows you to design the interior wall with what you want and the exterior wall as well at the cost of being 1 block.

2) Allow us to empower blocks, such as combining redstone with a iron block, which makes an empowered iron block.  This empowered iron block now carries a redstone charge, the whole point behind this is so that we can actually build light switches to houses.  Because if you were to build a switch to power lights in the roof, you need all these redstones and torches etc, to carry the signal up to the ceiling to power the lights.  Well with these empowered blocks, you can now carry redstone signals up without having to sacrifice design or space to hide these blocks.