Sergey Alakov was again, the first, if not one of the first, to spot this local reviews change - where when you see a local pack in the Google results, you can now filter those listings by reviews in a more granular manner. So now you can filter by half stars instead of just full stars, i.e. 4.5 stars or above vs 4 stars and above).
Here is a screen shot, this is not a test, this is live for everyone as far as I can tell:
I guess as more and more businesses adopt more and more reviews, letting searchers filter by reviews in a more granular way can't hurt.
It does add more options, which sometimes is not always a better thing.
Forum discussion at Twitter.