My top three thoughts...
Relevant, unique and up-to-date (frequency) content (I think you're right on track Peter (IMC)) will be one 'quality' factor. This is probably one of the majors.
Another should be quality of the coding itself.. not necessarily W3C validated, but at least close, and a site SHOULD conform to accepted usability and accessibilty best practices (meaning that it should be available for all browsers, and the majority of people with disabilities should be able to access the information on the site).
IBL's inbound links have to be a factor in quality. As their original reason for using IBL's is still valid, if you have a good high quality site, people out there will go, 'hey check this out' and link to it. As is the trend, NOT IBL's from link farms whose purpose is to simply but valid links and vertical directories should be considered decent links, maybe not as good as someone saying 'this site is great' but a heck of a lot better than an exchanged link for the purpose of raising your SE rankings.
What does everyone else think? I know there's a lot more but if your site works well in those three I would consider it 'quality'.. Let's hope Google and Yahoo do the same.
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