I may be wrong but I think [not] putting this functionality in the product encourages third party vendors to "partner" with MS to provide add-on products, spreading the wealth...

I just want to get my arms around this "we chose Oracle over SQL Server because we could recover a single table in Oracle" thing. The only way I know of to recover a single table from an Oracle backup is to restore the whole backup somewhere and then extract the data and structure from the table.

Let me guess: you do an export of the entire Oracle database to be able to restore a single table.