He says in the video that the api is already release?
Pretty sure he's talking about EABI, check out
this and
this on the Debian Wiki.
When you want to use hard floats, you need to tell the compiler what FPU to use for it. Besides the software FPU (either leaving it to the system or to the compiler's own implementations) there's VFP(lite), and you can use NEON for single precision as well.
At some forum talk I found via Google they said that the VFPlite of the Cortex-A8 is pretty useless because it's rather slow, NEON would be the only way to get a good FP performance. The VFP of the Cortex-A9 as well as its NEON unit are supposed to be much faster, and I'm pretty sure those are what he's pointing at.