This is actually a nice improvement, because 1) you can train "Hey Siri" to your own personal voice rather than it being triggered by anything that remotely resembles the phrase, and 2) IIRC they mentioned in the keynote that the always-on detection is now possible because the motion coprocessor is now integrated into the same chip with the main CPU, so they can detect phrases efficiently as an always-on feature (locally on the device, of course).

As to whether they would send any of the detected phrases to the "government", I think that is extremely unlikely both for technical and Apple's ideological privacy reasons.

Early comments from people who've tried 3D Touch say it's quite fast to get used to. I can imagine that having these quick shortcuts has great potential for removing unnecessary taps from common, often-repeated usage scenarios.

Also great for gaming, since you can finally make a distinction between pressing a virtual button and just resting a finger on it. I'm quite interested to see if this will also benefit on-screen keyboards.

I think it's great that the iPad Pro, accompanied with the new Pencil, is seriously adopting graphics design / drawing use cases. Those who've tried to draw or paint on an iPad know that it's not an ideal experience, and professionals have been turning to Surface Pro. Knowing Apple's attention to detail, the Pencil should have top notch performance when it comes to accuracy and latency. It will be interesting to see how much traction this gains among the professionals.

I'm also personally very interested in using this for my drawing/painting hobby purposes.

Everyone copies each other's good ideas. That's pretty much irrelevant. The important thing is who executes those ideas in the best possible way, and has the most compelling products. This is what Apple excels at.