"They both have their place. In SQL Server land the things that they limit to enterprise edition generally are functions that only really benefit data warehouses (partitioning and compression being two of the most obvious), and given that they know that the people who use data warehouses tend to have warehouses of cash, it comes with a cost."

Redmond could throw column level encryption into the lower tiers as a security measure, but oh, no!, that's "enterprisy".