But really, why is this argument even important? .NET can scale, if you toss out the religious arguments then you realize that just about anything can scale if you do it right. Which is the key point isn't it? The great startup lesson is that the PEOPLE are far more important than the technology.
I just wanted to share what I learnt in my research and provide as much awareness and guidance as possible so that .NET developers can use this as an entry/jump point into their own research.
Also in a round-about way prove that it is possible to do in .NET and what technologies you should look at to get there. Pure, free-flowing guidance / research on this topic is not always plentiful.
The web forms model has been a huge issue for programmers who are not mindful of its consequences and I'm glad MVC is making headway. I'm also happy to see MS starting to think about more developer oriented tool sets with projects like Nuget and Entity Framework Code First.
Scaling to higher levels is always going to require an awareness of design and architecture more fundamental than knowing any particular technology well.