Plagiarism is a pretty serious charge I'm gonna have to take a look at BOL when I get home and see for myself.  I hope you're mistaken!

As for moving from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005, I've been working with 2005 since the Beta's and CTP's, and I can honestly say (from a developer's point of view) I'm impressed with the new functionality they've added.  As you say, the documentation doesn't do it justice...  I've found dozens of issues with BOL where the info. is either misleading or just flat-out wrong.  Even submitted a few corrections to MS.  We'll see if any of them get fixed.

The SSMS interface is a little "busy" for me...  but then again I might just be used to having my QA and EM functionality in separate apps.  But the tabbed query window, integrated online help search, and the ability to connect directly to source control come in very handy.  BTW, AFAIK you can still use SQL 2000 SP4 QA to connect to SQL 2005, although EM doesn't connect.

As for the big bang - here's a few items (some of which were mentioned in the article):

- Being able to specify the structure of your FOR XML PATH results using XPath instead of the ridiculous node!node!node notation (who came up with that??) [SQL 2K5]

- Being able to manipulate large object (LOB) data without resorting to the wild and crazy TEXTPTR, READTEXT, WRITETEXT, etc. You can even create LOB local variables - try that in SQL 2000; and functions like LEN() work how you would expect them to! [SQL 2K5]

- How about being able to encrypt and decrypt your data directly in T-SQL instead of having to resort to third party tools that operate differently from vendor to vendor? [SQL 2K5]

- Let's not forget built-in XQuery querying of your XML data and the XML Data Manipulation Language (XML DML) statements that allow you to manipulate your XML data without resorting to COM object machinations -- that's huge! [SQL 2K5]

- Of course there's also SQLCLR integration which are a heckuva lot easier to write, much better documented, and a lot safer all around than extended stored procedures.  Plus they give you the advantage of using the managed .NET libraries to perform tasks in a few lines that would have taken hundreds of lines of unmanaged C++ in an XP wrapper on 2000. [SQL 2K5]

- Let's not forget the new ranking and windowing functions like ROW_COUNT() that allow you to efficiently do simple tasks that used to require some of the strangest, most complex, and inefficient self join contortions you've ever witnessed. [SQL 2K5]

We could go on and talk about the improvements to existing keywords like TOP(@local_variable), new keywords like DISABLE TRIGGER, improvements to query plan caching and the SQL engine in general, improvements to security (EXECUTE AS, etc.), HTTP Endpoints, and even some of the more obscure things like NEWSEQUENTIALID.

There's definitely some meat on them SQL bones