they mentioned it reached orbit... around the 10 minute mark. pretty fast! I think they mentioned at one point it was traveling at 3km/s. At 12mins, the solar arrays were deployed. They mentioned it would take a few days to dock with the ISS though.

I heard lots of cheering during the deployment of the solar array, I'm guessing past missions this has been the turning point?

I believe this was the first deployment of solar arrays for spacex. The previous orbit was internal power only.

Yup, they've launched a capsule before but in order to be a useful spacecraft the solar arrays are pretty high priority, and this was the first time that whole part of the spacecraft was put to the test.

I assume so. I imagine that once that big exploding burning thing has finished and shutdown, a lot of the "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" kinds of events become far less likely.