Not unless you think "extract a lot of money from clueless execs" is secret sauce. That, and support contracts - you know, throats to choke when it all goes wrong.
Also, F5 load balancers have real hardware failover capability, and can even synchronize TCP session state across instances. That's a pretty nice feature.
Plain old TLS termination isn't license-limited as far as I know.
EDIT: to answer your question, yes, you could probably do it with haproxy, but the added value in these appliances is iRules (TCL hooks for all network events, you could augment request processing etc) and vendor support.
I seem to remember even the entry license includes full TLS offloading so I doubt the poster above is correct that it is a cost issue.
As to if HAProxy can do the job, well, that depends. F5s are complex beasts and they can load balance application specific protocols that can be hard to find elsewhere, with the support contract that goes with it.
