Nice article. We are going through an upgrade to 2005 and it's nice to see what your doing being confirmed by your peers.

I would also add some more notes on hardware set-up. I'm a little weak in this area and like to see more on the initial set-up so I know I'm going to get the most out of the server.

For instance, I didn't know about volume alignment and found the following article very helpful:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/pdpliobp.mspx