Alas, WinFS, I knew him well Horatio
Being one of the original folks working on WinFS (demoing it at PDC 03, writing the first whitepaper and column on it) and being the "frontman" for WinFS, they looped me in on the news even though I left the database group six months ago to move over to SharePoint.
I actually applaud the decision the SQL Server team has made about mainstreaming WinFS into SQL. We always talked about doing this since the technology could benefit a broader audience that just the folks who would get it as a download. In fact, almost every SQL Server customer I spoke with wanted to have the capabilities described in WinFS against all their data.
In addition, some of the tenets we laid out for WinFS are actually being delivered in SharePoint. While it's not based on the WinFS technology, SharePoint delivers some of the key ideas that was part of WinFS (hierachical content types with rich metadata and business logic, replication - ok - this is really offline sync to Outlook and Groove in SharePoint, etc).
I think this is good news for WinFS and SQL Server. We just need to make sure we deliver this in Katmai now since it will be a paradigm shift for folks who want to integrate their structured and unstructured data together.
