Didn’t you also find it somewhat remarkable that the “pillars” of “Longhorn” have been supiciously missing from the recent Beta and CTP releases, including the PDC release? What is Microsoft doing here – are they planning to release Avalon and Indigo as a companion download to Vista or release an option pack?
While support for WCF and WPF for Win2003 and WinXP will proably accerelate adoption of these technologies, keeping them out of the retail box for Vista would certainly slow down adoption considerably. This would be most unfortunate, since WCF offers a much better interoperability and extensibility model than classic ASMX or WSE.