The goal is to have an easy, seamless migration path for existing grafana 1.x users.

We have a tool/wizard that imports your dashboards from elasticsearch (removing that dependency for graphite users).

Keep in mind that grafana 2.0 will of course continue to work with graphite, influxdb and opentsdb for metric storage.

I have my dashboards stored in influxdb. Will grafana2 be able to read them directly from there?

yes, but only for the import process that will read them from influxdb and save them into the grafana database (either embedded sqlite3 or external mysql, postgres).

InfluxDB is not really suitable as a general purpose data source (storing dashboards as influxdb metric series was more a temporary solution so influxdb users did not need to install elasticsearch, and influxdb dashboard storage did not support tag filtering).

With Grafana 2.0 needs to store a lot more, users, accounts, user starred dashboards & preferences. So a more general purpose database was needed.