Over at Christian's Blog "Electric Beach"  there is a great introduction to using the new Visual State Manager in Expression Blend June Preview with Silverlight (and later WPF) and skinning custom controls in Blend using the VSM. The tutorial is not only a great video, but there is a great write-up with illustrations to help walk you through the new capabilities, including state groups and state transitions (which are time based). It's definitely worth viewing and worth understanding how this feature works. It's also a lot easier way of working with states from the stand point of a Visual Designer.

Amazingly, other  "software vendors" seem to be attempting to take a very similar (if not the same) approach of having their own state management tools in products that aren't even in any kind of "public" CTP or preview yet. I wonder if they spied this in Expression Blend and decided to copy with a "me too" approach. It wouldn't be the first time however..