My Local BoL 2005 quote follows

"Using SET ROWCOUNT will not affect DELETE, INSERT, and UPDATE statements in the next release of SQL Server. Avoid using SET ROWCOUNT together with DELETE, INSERT, and UPDATE statements in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use it. Also, for DELETE, INSERT, and UPDATE statements that currently use SET ROWCOUNT, we recommend that you rewrite them to use the TOP syntax. For more information, see DELETE (Transact-SQL), INSERT (Transact-SQL), or UPDATE (Transact-SQL)."

Then MSDN Online BoL has the same Quote for 2008.

(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188774.aspx)

So it looks like it "might" be removed in a later release, sometime, perhaps, maybe 🙂