Oh, I'm all for stem cell research -- just not for it being funded by the federal government.
I can understand your position. I disagree that the feds shouldn't be funding scientific research, but we don't need to go into this deeply.
The advantage Obama has is that he can lift the restriction on ESC research without actually increasing federal funds into ESC research. The way the ban was set up
really hampered the researchers, because if they already had fancy, high-tech, equipment in their labs, they could
not use that (already purchased) equipment to study a variety of new cell lines. They could only work in animals, or in established lines. Heck, Classical Hero mentioned iPS lines, suggesting they were just as good as ESC (which is a tough claim to make if you're not allowed to do experiments on ESC!), so they could also work using technology discovered in Japan.
So, with the lifting of this ban, established researchers are now going to be able to migrate any promising results seen in the established lines, or in animal models, to human ESC. That's really huge, because now they can use equipment they'd already bought. They can replicate experiments using a larger number of test samples, and they can investigate events which might not have been apparent in the established lines
The problem with Bush's ban, is that a researcher would need to build an entirely new lab in order to study ESC (or, even more frustratingly, toss out equipment purchased with Fed dollars, and rebuy equipment with other dollars). A lot of equipment is too expensive for one lab (e.g., laser-scanning confocal microscopes), and so labs would often pool resources to purchase these. If even ONE lab had used federal dollars for the microscope, none of the labs would have been able to use the equipment to study ESC. They could take high quality images of their animal cells, but not their human cells, etc. What makes matters even worse is if a building had been partially funded by the feds. They had to construct entirely new buildings.
The stem cell research field is one of the hottest and most-promising fields in biotech. And the problems they're dealing with are huge too. We need all the resources we can get. If Obama does this reversal, he needn't add more resources, because he's decreasing the cost of currently-existing resources. Of course, I'd be happy if the feds increased money. Science is a certainly a shovel-ready stimulus project.
edit: a for a more general comment, since I'm Mr. Links, here's a talk (video) regarding the science and utility of stem cell research (as it applies to the brain) from one of the world's most respected neural stem cell researchers.
http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.asp?showID=9136