re: vertical tabs, there’s still more fleshing out to do on the sidebar, I think it’ll justify itself more in the future. I’m not opposed to having on option for normal tabs as well. The sidebar will eventually be resizeable, of course.
The minimap is there, it’s just sitting on the right hand side. Still more work to do on it: the view port isn’t being displayed, and it doesn’t respond to mouse input.
Plugins aren’t enabled yet, no. They will be in the future, but there may be some changes to the API.