I believe that part of the situation MS has faced is that SQL Server has been playing catch up for a long time. Even though I use SQL Server 2000 extensively now in my day-to-day development, its weaknesses have been very evident. Some might have been addressed in service releases, while others were of a nature that would have made that difficult.

Looking at the feature set of SQL Server 2005 suggests that with a few notable exceptions they have caught up to the marketplace, and I suspect that after this release, we will see more of the missing elements provided via service releases on a tighter schedule. I am only guessing, but I believe that what took so long with this release was that some fundamental changes had to be made to the core of the server to open that option.

It is also important to remember, though, that they did release some major feature extensions during the wait (such as Reporting Services and the XML Services packages). What has been lacking has been an integrated release that made some of these disparate parts accessible.

Let's hope that with this coming release it is done right.