2) $129 is too much. This one cracks me up. Apple is bundling a $500 product into the OS (and other OS based servers are far more expensive) and people think $129 is too much?
Apple is bundling a bunch of GUI management tools, akin to Webmin. Was that worth 500$ before ? Nope. Is it more expensive elsewhere ? No. Let's face it, OS X Server was always a toy Unix compared to other big-Iron Unix systems and even to Linux as far as enterprise support goes. Volume management, hello Cupertino ?
Their old archaic way of managing storage is atrocious and no, I don't necessarily want to hook up with a huge array and run Xsan, I just want to intelligently manage my local storage. No, just RAID1 volumes is not enough, I want my volumes logical and independant of my physical volumes. I want to be able to move logical extents to new physical extents without having to take down anything on the box.
And what about those GUI tools ? I can't even just do X11 tunneling over SSH to my desktop to run them, I have either run their Remote Desktop stuff or use a 3rd party solution like VNC... What good are they ? At least make them web based (HP Systems Management Homepage type stuff) and join in to what the rest of the industry got clued into years ago if you don't want to code GUI stuff over X11.
And other OS based servers are not more expensive. Solaris is
free. I won't even bother linking to all the free distributions of Linux that are ready for the server (Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch, Ubuntu). The BSDs. Unix server product vendors make their money off of support contracts, not the actual software itself, an arena Apple obviously wants no part of.
All the bits and pieces of server software is mostly re-packaged open source components nowadays anyhow. Most every vendor out there is using Apache and Tomcat in their web-based products, Postfix on the mail side, I've seen a lot of MySQL and PostgreSQL based products (HP uses both, MySQL I've seen in their Output Manager product, PostgreSQL in their System Fault Management, Symantec uses MySQL for Brightmail), and let's not even get into OpenSSL and OpenSSH...
Heck, even Apple does this. OS X server is just a bunch of open source components packaged up together. Apache, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, ClamAV...
So please, pretty please, with a cherry on top, let's not call OS X Server something worth 500$ and compare it to "others that are more expensive but in actuality are free to download and run and only expensive to get vendor support for".
This rant was longer than it should have been. I love OS X as a desktop OS. I'd pay 129$ for a Lion upgrade with my eyes closed. Best of both worlds. Unix underpinnings and powerful command-line (everything is there!) with integration for all my server products yet fast and easy to setup GUI that is mostly consistent so as to attract a large user base that makes it a good proposition for commercial software vendors to port their packages to. Apple just never got really serious about the server side of it (and lets face it, it's not their business and they obviously want no part of the entreprise market) and I'm not faulting them for that. Let's not be as disingenious as to claim their selling you a 500$ product for 129$ though.
I'm shocked at how many people are so willing to just wave away all the nice under-the-hood changes and improvements that Snow Leopard offers just because there aren't any super-radical UI changes... really disappointing to be honest. Does it really have to be all flashy to be of interest to you? What, the functional side of things doesn't matter any more?
See how this little change in your comment still makes it apply very much to the MacRumors crowd ?

The fact is, you're not really dealing with technical people on MacRumors, no matter how much some of them pretend they are. Heck, some of them still believe that HTML is a programming language and that they are web developers because their tools of choice are PhotoShop and Dreamweaver.