Great article!  

I've noticed this behaviour as well on one of my production databases 🙁

There is a good explanation on MS site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/271566/ and a related article about a fix in SP4. Suppose you can't change the application to insert the correct data type to avoid the table scan, then you can add an index, right? Well, in SP3 and earlier this can lead to incorrect results: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/899976

JP