I've underestimated what is going on. Boudewijn Rempt, Krita's maintainer writes:
It's wide awake! Since October we've added: loading gimp brushes, Wacom tablet support, a brush tool, pen tool, airbrush tool, clone tool, fill tool, line tool, ellipse tool, box tool, image rotation, scaling and transforming, CMYK and GrayA color models, brightness, contrast and colorize plugins, more composition operatators. Not to mention bugfixes, lots of work on the internals and developer documentation (http://koffice.kde.org/developer/krita) and lots of stuff I've already forgotten.
We're working on: better access to image data for plugins, selections, previews for dialogs, channel depth > 8 bit, core improvements like easier access to image data.
Finally, there's about half a dozen people regularly contributing to Krita's progress. With a bit of luck we'll have a first alpha done this autumn. And as soon as I figure out how to create them, I'll put up SuSE 9.1 RPM snapshots up for download.