Interesting/worrying! We have lots of code that does something like

declare @i int

set @i = 10

set rowcount @i

insert into tab1

select * from tab2

in order to insert the top n rows from one table into another.

We can't easily use 'top' because it won't accept a variable, ie

select top @i...

won't work, so we'd need to use dynamic sql everywhere.

I've verified that this use of rowcount still works in 2008, and for interest it works with delete as well, ie

set rowcount 1

delete from table1

will only delete 1 row.