@diodesign
Not changed? Is mature? Try again on both counts.
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645577.aspx>, look for geographical data types if you consider that core db, but in particular 'OVER Clause Support Enhanced' (niiiice) and 'Analytic Functions'. Under the 'Analytic Functions' they've got lead & lag. If they do what I think they do that alone would be a strong push to migrate up. A fair bit has changed under the hood and given that the damn thing is at core a DB engine, and all the sparkly is built upon that, it should have been mentioned here. Which leads me on to... MSSQL isn't up to scratch.
I don't call it mature, I call it decaying. When I joined my current company the first thing I was asked to do was to examine the feasibility of rewriting the underlying data management from MSSQL to mongo (yeah, really). They had some severe performance problems. I dug in and found it was the usual optimiser problem, failing on a ridiculously simple query something like -- select * from tbl where tbl.x = (select max(x) from tbl where...). Optimiser failed, caused massive table scanning carnage. It was so bad they nearly spent many many thousands to convert it to another (unproven) db engine.
Hardly the first headache we've had with it either. And the documentation is crap. Just for example, open BOL and go to <ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v10/MS.SQLSVR.v10.en/s10de_6tsql/html/a33d5db9-aed1-4c96-85bf-9d3b5051c635.htm> and try to find a function that returns the difference of 2 geographic instances. You can't cos it's not there (it's STDifference). There's a ***lot*** of bad shit in BOL, esp. on geographic data types, but all over.
TL;DR - MSSQL 2008 is beta quality and I have not expectation of 2012 being any better. There are also more worrying problems which I doubt even some of the writers of the article might know.
On to other points.
SSIS - my experience is more trouble than it's worth. If the data is bad then you'll spend almost all your time cleaning that and SSIS won't help. If it's good then you can load it in directly. Still, maybe my experience is jaded and it's improved, but it looks to GUI-heavy to make me comfortable.
Always on groups. Dunno. Power View. Ditto
DQS. Might be worth a poke.
MDS. Can't even understand what that's about. And "...with regards to IIS permissions and Silverlight"? I'm with eadon on this one. The smell of frustration, complexity, lockin and pain (pain is something MS is good at. Very good).
"What we are now looking at 14 years later with SQL Server 2012 is a mature set of tools" I don't bloody think so, and I suspect the various contributors either haven't seriously got their hands dirty yet or haven't got the guts to speak honestly about it.