The following sentence leaped out at me. The latest version of Internet Explorer is considered to be on a par with its rivals. Really? Considered by whom?
But in http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html they are still dead last. And you sometimes need to jump through special hoops to get that level of compatibility - for instance without a custom http header you can't get compatibility mode for intranet sites. IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed private mode. (Often jokingly called "porn mode".) And, as you note, competitors like Webkit are rapidly moving the bar for the future.
In no way is this "on par with". "No longer horribly unacceptable compared to" I could grant you. But not "on par with".
Not true. This was included in IE9.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/product...
IE9 is missing a lot of neat stuff which others have had for quite some time (limited CORS or D&D, no text-shadow, offline apps, transitions, placeholders, gradients, animations, xhr2, classlist, History API, typed arrays, async scripts, strict mode, webworkers, file & filereader API, 3D transforms, websockets, flexbox, requestAnimationFrame, datalist, page visibility, forms 2, ...)
IE10 is significantly better, but still behind (mostly due to no webgl and fullscreen)