Honestly, in my opinion, if you do your job right on the SQL syntax, DB design and indexing a NOLOCK statement shouldn't be necessary in any environment.

If you're encountering severe locking problems in SQL 2005 or higher, use SNAPSHOT isolation. That way reads never take locks, but don't read inconsistent data. It's the way Oracle works (more or less). The downside is that TempDB usage increases.

Yes, there will be the occasional case where nolock is necessary. The problem is that it is vastly overused with people adding it to every query without the slightest knowledge of what it actually means or the possible problems they could be causing for themselves.