These are good changes, IMO. They do highlight the artificial nature of what Twitter counts as characters in your 140, but that's been true for many, many years. And keeping overall messages terse and snappy keeps the service doing what it does best — delivering pithy comments and messages not long screeds (plenty of other platforms for that). Only now with more pictures.
I do wish that, in removing stuff from counting to the 140, they included links. That would encourage people to use real links, vs. URL shorteners that rely (in the long run) on those services staying up. (I do understand that some of them like bit.ly, provide useful analytics for clickthroughs, but I suspect most of their use is driven by keeping link length under control for Twitter).
Twitter remains, for me, the best micro-blogging platform. These changes incrementally improve it.
Here’s what you need to know about Twitter’s new character limit update
Here’s what you need to know about Twitter’s new character limit update