I'm pretty sure we'll see plenty of mods for 1.8... As I pointed out when I saw the same complaints being made about upgrading mods to both MC 1.6 and MC 1.7, skipping a version of Vanilla is only going to make it harder to play catch-up when 1.9 appears on the horizon soon. Anything not adapted now will have to be adapted later in addition to any other new features.
The new Mojang loader auto-loads a runtime version of Java 1.8.0_25 if Java is not already installed, so you won't have to worry about updating that anymore... By the way, the new Curse launcher uses the Mojang launcher and performs the same way, as I tested two days ago when I formatted my dual-boot partition and installed Windows 10 v.10122, re-loading just the Curse client and the Direwolf20 pack.
Many of the changes are to internal systems which have been in the process of being rewritten since 1.6 first was released as a snapshot, and 1.8 out-performs 1.7.10 on my hardware by quite a bit while using less memory.