I like Gmail's new "important" message feature that they are testing in beta currently. To use it effectively with my setup that already automatically sorts my Gmail into categories, I had to do a few alterations. I am using the "Multiple Inboxes" lab feature and I wanted to get the new division of "Unread and Important" and other "Unread". The priority inbox only shows those emails that are in my inbox in those categories but because I have popfile moving my email to other tags, I needed to change the filters in my multiple inboxes.
I set the my filters to
So now my inbox has all my unread important messages at the top (sorted by category) and all my unread, probably not as important categorized emails in the next section.