The list of search engines and the recent bookmarks have been removed and there's a new section of recent activities that includes recently-closed tabs and recent downloads. Another new section is called "recommendations", but it's still a work in progress.
You can hide the thumbnails, hide the list of recent activities and the recommendations if you don't find them useful.
The updated tab page is not yet ready to be released, but you can enable it if you have a recent Chromium build (Windows, Mac, Linux) by editing the desktop shortcut and adding the following flag in the target field:
--new-new-tab-page