Microsoft really needs this. ML.NET is quite anemic compared to the industry-standard AI toolkits: TensorFlow, theano, scikit-learn, Torch, Keras, etc.
Another way to think about it is that for folks building in .NET, ML.NET makes it easy for them to start using many of the ML techniques without having to learn something new.
For what it's worth, we are pretty proud of the performance as well - I wouldn't call it training wheels :)
On both scale up and run times, it measures up as among the best-in-class[1]. That is to say, for the scenarios which people use it most commonly (GBT, linear learners), it's a great fit!
