While the technology behind these updates is quite sophisticated, the actual purpose is simple: to actually provide answers instead of just results to your Google search queries.
The first new feature, answer highlighting, attempts to complete your search query by bolding the answer in the result. So now when you search, results will include bold words that Google deems to be the answer. This is a nifty little development -- powered by Google Squared research -- that's especially handy and convenient, as prior to the feature update Google was simply bolding search keywords.
As Google admits, answer highlighting won't work with all your queries, but it is very effective with searches around information that could fit in a table. Hence the inspiration and use of Google Squared data. Try it out on "empire state height" and you should actually get the height of the Empire State Building in bold at the top of the results page.
The second update -- rich snippets for events -- is more for webmasters, but the net benefit is that Google will now better answer your event-related queries. Should webmasters annotate their pages to support the new format, you'll find that your event search will return more pertinent data. So results with events will show all events as snippets under the master listing broken up into individual links that highlight the event name, date and location.
Both of these updates are subtle on the surface and will probably go unnoticed by the average searcher. Should the newly applied technology work as promised, however, these updates could help continue to distinguish Google Search from all the rest.