Backup and restore require far too much hands on DBA work. I've mentioned this before here, but back in the 1980's, mainframe DB2 just required a restore database statement to some point in time, and it took care of the rest. The DBMS knew about all of the backup and log files, and did whatever roll back and roll forward that was necessary. Object level recovery should not require a 3rd party vendor product.

Oracle's GoldenGate walks all over replication. It queues up the replicated data, can easily be monitored, and is easily restartable when something goes wrong. It supports many DBMS', and can be used for SQL Server -> SQL Server replication.

The built in monitoring tools are primitive. Quest/Dell even give away a basic version of SQL Spotlight called Spotlight Essentials. Microsoft should include the equivalent of all of the free 'lite' versions.