Unity Indie supports static light maps and dynamic decal shadows. It also supports shaders but no render to texture.
The lack of dynamic shadow mapping in Unity Indie really is a bummer but on the other hand I always found the dynamic shadows of Gamestudio quite unusable. So actually there isn´t that much difference between the commercial editions.
As far as I know (from lurking around in their forum), one way to do day/night cycle properly (in Indie) is to update lightmaps for different scenes. Most basic shaders are supported in 1000$+ version unlike GS.
Stable or not, I am sure Conitec is still working on optimising the shadows (considering the beta changes) so yeah, we can expect it to improve over the time while the Indie version of Unity will always remain gimped without dynamic shadows and any useful shaders. The big advantage for Unity, as far as I am concerned, is the terrain editor (for my needs of course) and the crossplatform support. Then again, not everyone is going to create a crossplatform game and as far as terrain is concerned, I can do that in different app like Max and Mudbox (with texture painting).
Besides, let's first wait and see how stable Unity3D will be on Windows (3ds hasn't crashed for me at all, even betas). :P
BTW, decal shadows is the last thing a person would want over Stencil. It's just not the same thing.. AT ALL.
EDIT: lostclimate, I meant what Xarthor posted.
