so what does this mean for us end users? anything we need to do or just keep p2pool mining as usual?
Just keep mining as usual. It's more a notice for people running p2pool nodes that they need to update to the latest repo to have new networks.py files and a patch related to user vardiff targets. (The patch is optional, the networks.py changes are not.)
Some of the bigger pools are going to try and all change over at the same time later today. At that point older nodes will keep working but have a smaller pool hash rate since new or updated nodes are on a separate p2pool network than them.