This is continuing a bad trend and MS are damaging themselves
databases have to be rock solid for business; adding fancy new features are Microsoft's traditional method of trying to create demand for a new product, the trouble is this is directly opposed to reliability. SQL Server 2000 was pretty damn solid, SQL Server 2008 had serious documentation holes in their fancy new geographic data types, and some weird SQL behaviour including some outright crashing bugs.
Both of these cost me and my company some heavy time to track down and bypass at a previous job.
Three things a database needs: reliability, reliability, reliability. Features, features, features are not a substitute.
Another thing the article indicates is Microsoft trying to deskill DB use and management. This provides nice lock-in for them, but causes problems for the users who think that because they can design tables visually (which is fucking trivial!) and they can 'draw' their SQL, then they know what they're doing. I can say from other people's experience, this is not true: these visual tools have unexpected behaviours of their own (had to help a tech track down why data from multiple tables was being deleted when using visual tools), and far, far worse is that by having pretty diagrams of joins etc it gives the impression that they are in control. This is completely wrong: such diagrams just hide the syntax of SQL, not the semantics, and there are some nasty semantic holes in SQL which had bitten me and others -- even when I know that they're there! (Specific examples: nulls producing tristate logic, nulls in not exists queries, transactions not necessarily being quite as atomic as you think they might be, and others).
And visual SQL design tools never seem to support the full syntax, which you rapidly need as your techs/support staff gain experience.
"testing, debugging, version control, refactoring, dependency checking, and deployment" -- testing should be done on a separate server, likewise debugging, version control should be trivial because SQL is text (So what exactly is this offering?), some competent refactoring tools would be nice at times, though!, but deployment? What is deployment mean here?
"In addition, the query and design tools should mean that developers rarely need to switch to SQL Server Management Studio." -- Oh bloody hell...
"A SQL Server database project stores the entire database schema as the Transact-SQL (T-SQL) scripts that are required to create it, including code that runs in the database, such as stored procedures and triggers. You can import the schema from an existing database, or you can build it from scratch." -- you can extract the text of an entire database already, in executable format, and it should be in version control anyway (although admittedly it never is). Right click on the database in the studio then Tasks|Generate Scripts... But this is less useful than it seems as a database's value is in its data as much or more as in its structure.
"Juneau has a visual table designer" -- mega useful, that. And have you seen the kind of cruddy, verbose and deliberately nonstandard SQL these things produce?
"if a database admin has made some changes since the schema was imported to the project, Schema Compare will highlight them. The tools are also able to generate update scripts that apply the project schema to the target, and warn you of consequences such as data loss." -- had exactly this problem over multiple sites at a previous job. A tool to reliably diff the schema would have been somewhat useful, but far less than you might think because the application *using the database* would expect certain semantic properties, so you have to change not just the DB but the application layer. This really is messy.
"no visual query designer, and no database diagramming or visual modelling tool" -- see above. I really find these are no value whatsoever, and in fact can be worse than useless. I'm not saying this as a 733t DBA (which I'm not) to put other people down, but I've seen the problems that they've caused.
Bottom line? Certain new SQL features such as recursive with, pivots etc. are very handy indeed, most especially the rather simple row_number() in my experience, but there's no feature like reliability (not just in the DB, but also the other tools, like the reporting service, he says bitterly). MS has forgotten that and it will cost them. And doubtless continue to cost their users too.