Windows 2.0 did away with the forced tiling of windows. It also introduced the ability to have icons wherever in the hell the user pleased, all over the desktop. There was also no way of keeping track of how many windows were open.
The problem with this approach is that open application windows could cover up other windows or icons, and the user would have no idea that they were there. Getting back to them would be difficult to the casual user, since there might realistically be many windows in the way and the user might not know about Alt+Tab.

With Windows 95 those problems are solved with the Taskbar. It provides a reserved space for minimized windows and non-minimized windows alike in the form of a button. All you need to do is click on a button to bring that particular window to the front.

Here we not only see the new WordPad program, but we also see the little thing called a Tooltip. Mousing over certain parts of the UI pop up little descriptors about what each icon corresponds to. If only modern UIs could have that.

Yet another new feature in Windows 95 is the ability to use long filenames. Previously we were limited to eight characters which was more a limitation of DOS and CP/M before it than anything. In the days of the old single-sided 160K floppy disks this limit made sense since characters take up space. But with multi-megabyte hard drives, this limit doesn't make much sense anymore.
Previous OS shells did try and implement long file name support, but this usually involved creating extra files with this information in them since only Microsoft could modify the filesystem. Now Windows 95 stores these long file names as well as a shorter version, in the file system.

The control panel has not changed much since Windows 3.1.

One other new thing in Windows 95 is the Device Manager, since Windows 95 is 32-bit (or mostly 32-bit) it requires non-DOS drivers which can be managed here.