One thing in particular that's very nice about tilelayers already is that they are ostensibly the same as if you were using backpals, but you can manipulate them in so many more ways. The current commands allow you to control the color channels of a tileset via script, meaning you can make palette adjustments and possibly enrich the color quality of your environments without needing to actually modify your tilesets much.
Here, I've put all three channels in a timeout loop and set their values to random (0,1) along with changing the tileset's alpha to anything other than 1 to create the motion blur effect you see used on a lot more servers these days.
The result is pretty freakin' groovy.
As an added bonus, you can also set class objects to have the same RGB channel setup as the tilelayers, meaning that their palettes can change along with the palettes you designate on different gmaps.
So say that you have a tree as a class object, and you had it set to match the palette of the tileset that you've specified. When you drop the tree into a level, its color channels will be set to match the tileset's color channels, meaning that you could globally manipulate color channels for both objects and tilesets at the same time to ensure some consistency in color. This is a bit different from doing a seteffect, because it's not the same as simply colorizing the entire screen.