I've just been playing with some of the options in MAME 0.70, and noticed the 'direct3d' option, which nicely stretches the graphics to fit the screen, without the blur of hwtretch - I like it.
Also, I noticed that games with bad dumps (eg GTMR) seem to automatically skip the 'press any key' bad dump warnings - this is great news for FE users

I'm probably behind the times, I haven't had much time to play with MAME for a while...