The Microsoft stack is not always just a Microsoft stack any more. e.g. it has jQuery out of the box. Of course you mix and match when you get to the high end. The idea of the MS-only shop is not as true as it used to be, many people are more pragmatic.

I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind

Why, because MS didn't supply every single piece of server infrastructure software that So use, just the main ones? That's an odd definition of "lagging".

MS have a distributed cache called "Windows Server AppFabric" (formerly "velocity"). I don't know that much about it.