This is some of the best news in YEARS. If I had to pick ONE lens that I absolutely wanted a manufacturer to make, it would have been an all new anamorphic. If I had to pick ONE company to make it and do it right, it would've been ZEISS.
I hope these lenses confirm the large interest in anamorphics among the DSLR crowd, because if there's one thing that confirmed interest seems to do fairly quickly, it seems to create lots of new interest-satiating products. A healthy plethora of new-generation anamorphics would be amazing, especially with the GH cameras' 2x crop making "wide" a bit difficult to pull off at times. GOP1 on the GH2 already has buckets of tastiness that I'm absolutely satisfied with, but I can tell that the right lenses would make this tiny camera unbeatable for what I'm after.
while Zeiss can be a tad on the clinical side of things, I think the very nature of anamorphic lenses will provide the user with ample means of combating their surgical aesthetic. I have no doubt that, should the Zeiss sharpness be what you want from these lenses, they will deliver. But any anamorphic, if provoked (especially with aggressive light sources), WILL show organic character. If I had to make one prediction, I'd say Zeiss will probably offer them with "flare" and "Zeiss look" coatings (if not right away, further down the road).