As far as our organization is concerned we really don't care whether they issue service packs or not. A year or more is way too long to wait for updates to problems we find in the product.

Instead we rely on the Cumulative Updates. If I had to wait until Q4 of 2010 to fix problems we ran into in SQL 2008 SP1, then my company would be sunk. Fortunately most of those issues were corrected by the CU's that came out shortly thereafter.

Which brings me to another thing, I have no idea why people think a Service Pack is of better quality than a CU. Service packs introduce just as many problems as CU's do. At least with a CU, the individual impact is much smaller and skipping one doesn't mean waiting another year or so for fixes.

Personally, I would have down voted this item on MS connect.