As far as innovation goes, read up on Dryad. They do a few pretty interesting things. It goes above and beyond what MapReduce does. The computation is expressed as a giant dynamic directed graph (the graph can change during computation). Each node is a program that feeds into other programs, but fault tolerance and all the other messy bits of distributed programming are abstracted away from the programmer. Think of it as a more generic MapReduce that allows a broader set of computations to easily be performed (put another way, MapReduce provides a subset of the computations possible with Dryad. I suspect given enough cleverness you could get MapReduce to do everything Dryad does, but it'd be pretty hacky)
Also, check out the LINQ support. It is probably one of the coolest things they've done with it.
I understand that it's more than just Hadoop.NET. Perhaps I broad brushed, but fundamentally, these are tweaks from what exists. I am not saying that it is purposeless, but I am saying is that I expect more from Microsoft. In order to justify the cost of purchasing Microsoft products, it must create an order of magnitude increase in value, which I'm not seeing.
In essence: neat, but marginal.
Anyway, yea I agree... it's definitely not as earth-shattering as MapReduce was. It has some neat integration with other Microsoft technologies but I never really thought of it as a commercial product.
I don't know why people are down voting you. You had valid points and concerns. I voted you back up to help out a bit (you shouldn't lose karma over a perfectly legitimate discussion on the pros and cons of a technology)
You can see some such technologies "leaking" to public through Windows Azure on this Dryad release from MS Research, but these are side cases.
Michael Isard (one of the Dryad guys on the linked page) published a paper on Autopilot (Microsoft internal cluster management software) in 2007, but you can't buy Autopilot even now.
And risk their dominant position by creating a new market they can't control as well as the last one?
Don't hold your breath.
