Nice article and I agree that MS should KISS.  That's what I find to be so great about it.  It is simple where you need it to be (like SQL tuning...it just works and typically doesn't require hints like the incredibly stupid, bug-laden Oracle optimizer), and yet offers enough tuning capability to run with the big dogs...and they're opening that up a bit more, which it a good thing.

To clarify one of your points, in Oracle, a schema is not like a database, it is simply a privileged user that owns objects...whether they be tables, indexes, procedures, etc.  There is no definition of storage attached to a schema owner in Oracle, you define that on an object by object basis (unless you take the default tablespace of the schema owner).