BTW, I did not explain why we think Always On is the strategic direction... The two reasons are simplicity and SQL 2014.

1) Always On is inherently less work to set up and manage than transactional replication. Therefore it should always be the preferred option for any new data distribution scenario if the other chioce is any form of transactional replication.

2) The new in-memory and column-store facilities introduced with SQL 2014 work with Always On for data distribution, but do not work with transactional replication. The new SQL 2014 features will give massive performance improvements to many workloads, but there will still be a need to scale-out to deal with workload volume - and the only scale-out option with the new stuff is Always On.

Although we have no insight to Microsoft future plans, we would not be surprised if Always On gets more enhancements while replication withers. We have seen the start of this in that hetrogeneous replication was dropped from SQL Server over the last 2 releases, while Always On was enhanced to support up to 8 read-only secondaries.