Drupal 8 is coming. Configuration Management is new, shiny and nice. But it's not going to make Features a thing of the past. The ugly part of Features will be gone for good, while the best part, the real concept behind Features, is going to stay.

The stated aim for CMI is not to replace Features. CMI aims at making it much simpler to transport configuration changes from development to production, and this aim was reached.

All other benefits of Features are out of scope for CMI. These include: packaging configuration, reusing configuration in other projects (and not simply moving it between the development and production version of the same site) and enabling real-time team collaboration (developer A and developer B build two separate features for the same site, like the News and Blog sections, simultaneously).

So, configuration Management is neither Features done right nor Features done wrong. It is a nice way to replace and improve one use case for Features: making configuration exportable into text files. It is a huge step forward to developers and it paves the way for additional modules that could offer the same functionality of Drupal 7 plus Features in a much cleaner and more reliable way.