A good and balanced article. I take exception to the final sentence in the MyISAM section though: "Overall for small read-only data sets Myisam out of the box (Downloaded from SourceForge) is an excellent choice, but does struggle as the datasets grow, and requires tuning".

I am not sure what you would define as small, but we have a 180gb spatial database with 450 million rows running off MyISAM and the performance does not appear to have degraded with size at all.

Spatial databases are still a bit of a specialized subset, though this was the reason I switched from SQL Server to MySQL in the first place.