Angular 2.0 aims to build a complete platform for web applications by improving performance, developer productivity, and versatility compared to AngularJS 1.x. Key goals include making the framework faster, simpler, and more modular. It focuses on improved change detection, lazy loading of code, and support for features like universal rendering. Major companies like Capital One, The Weather Channel, and LucidChart adopted Angular 2.0 to build applications with better performance, collaboration, and maintenance. The framework saw contributions from an active open source community and remains one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks.