I'll go ahead an disagree with that. I've built some killed ETL systems that would logon to FTP, download only what was needed, mark what was downloaded, import the data, transform it, validate it, and merge it with the final tables all using just T-SQL including some rather crazy "don't know how many columns there are in the import" functionality using data imported from Double-Click.net.

ETL is just not that difficult. It's ok to use SSIS for this type of stuff but I haven't actually found a need for it. I've even been able to do parallel loads without it.