The platform is starting to approach first class, but the culture that permeates most Microsoft shops holds the platform and MS developer community back. Many MS orgs actively avoid open source and/or "community" driven projects, and possess a strong NBM and NIH attitude. This means projects like Node, even with the blessing of Scott Hanselman, will never see the light of day in their datacenters.

The way Stackoverflow operates (leveraging developer platform expertise + commercial and opensource tools) should be seen a role model. Unfortunately, in Microsoft circles, it's more of a black sheep.

Windows Azure seems pretty cool. At least it has the best relational database of the big three clouds, and the best blobstore+CDN solution. However, it makes IIS mandatory, which seems (I'm still learning) to be optimized for short queries. iisnode should make long-polling and websockets possible.

There isn't. It's just that MS is a bit more expensive than L* (LAMP for instance).