Sometimes I listen to the beginning of a podcast on the laptop, then switch for whatever reason to something else. I noticed that after putting the podcasts onto my iPod and playing them, they'd just start playing somewhere not at the beginning. The first couple times I thought maybe it was somehow skipping (especially since it'd start playing a podcast a couple seconds into it), but it turns out that they're actually sync'd with wherever I left off listening on the laptop.
I know this because I listened to 15 minutes of a podcast locally then put it on the Shuffle, thinking I'd have to fast-forward to get back to where I left off. It was nice to turn it on and pick up exactly where I left off. My Archos would fail wildly with something like that.
As a feature, it's pretty cool, especially since skipping through a huge podcast is time-consuming. Technically, it's probably easy to do also, since you can just store a control file on the iPod and write it with seek information.