It is a really exciting time in astronomy at the moment, a real age of discovery. As the article points out, it was not so many years ago that we didn't even know if exoplanets existed, and now we know about nearly 1000 of them. Our detection methods, while clever are pretty limited. They all tend to bias discoveries to certain kinds of planets and star systems, so it's reasonable to expect that the typical star system is a bit different than our current database would suggest.
But what's exciting to me is that our imaging technologies are improving all the time, both through better optics and computer assisted imaging (eg: adaptive optics which can offset much of the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere). This means that there's an excellent chance that before long we'll be able to start getting more detail about these systems, possibly including analysis of light from some of the planets which will tell us what kind of gases are in their atmospheres. In my lifetime we may even be able to answer the question of whether life exists on other planets (not necessarily intelligent life, but any life would be a momentous discovery).
All in all, it's a great time to be alive: I think of it as the dawn of an age of discovery. If you're into exoplanet discoveries and you have an iPad, I'd highly recommend the Exoplanet app (I am not affiliated with it in any way, it's just a cool little app).
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/XU9WOB4NPqI/story01.htm
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