What's particularly noteworthy here is that the correction happens entirely in-camera (for JPEGs, the same process can be applied to RAW files in the Capture NX software), without any need for pre-analysis of the lens characteristics. This means the improvement in image quality will apply to all your lenses, not just your Nikon glass, and not just recent lenses with a CPU in them, etc.

(Note that Nikon says the CA correction will "work best with Nikon lenses" and that they "can't be responsible for it working with third-party lenses," but that strikes me as a bit of marketing speak, as well as a bit of CYA, to prevent people from complaining to Nikon that the D3 or D300 don't make their Tamron lenses look better.)

This is really a first in single-lens reflex digital cameras, where you have to take account of the fact that a camera body can be used with numerous lenses of widely varying characteristics - even lenses that hadn't left the drawing board when the camera body landed on a store shelf. A camera with a fixed lens would seem to offer an easier opportunity to implement in-camera lens corrections, and yet even here relatively few manufacturers have ventured into in-camera lens corrections. (Certain of Panasonic's fixed lens digicams that include the company's Venus Engine II processor have the ability to correct for chromatic aberration, and we believe Fujifilm has also included some lens correction techniques in past fixed lens models.)