I haven't tried it out yet but I think it might be fun. Less pressure/stress/deadline and huge opportunities to roll-your-own web-app for students (in the area of 20-40k students). Salary wise is also great (especially those government funded universities).
There are also some really horrible elements to this job. For starters, the stability - which sounds great - means that you will truly be surrounded by dead weight. Utterly unmotivated people work in some of these departments. It really got to me, to the point where I couldn't stand to be there anymore. A pension is great, but I'm not going to hover around for 30 years in a spiritually dead place (I'm not exaggerating here). I'll find another way to save for retirement.
Another problem is that the jobs almost never lead to the top. There are a few CIO/style or "Chief Architect" style jobs at universities, and those are pretty sweet gigs for those who get them. But if you have a job in a non-academic department, you're definitely a cost center, the definitive in-house programmer. There are very interesting projects in academic departments, but expect what I'd call a "parchment ceiling" - ie., you can't progress without the right degree. In a software company, people seem to like grad degrees, but if you can bring it, they'll put you in a high impact position with a lot of creativity and automony. At a university, the Ph.D grant-holder is in charge. Period. The dev is more or less a (decently paid and well appreciated) paraprofessional.
This was just my experience (I worked for a university as a dev for almost 3 years). Overall, I'd say that unless you really want the stability, don't do it.
I'm currently working part-time at school just for fun and to have the experience of how it feels working there. This isn't a "research developer" kind of job but really IT job, developer.
Sometime it is hard to convince your boss that his/her approach was wrong in terms of software engineering point of view.
I like how people don't work overtime and sometime leave early :). Might be good to start a startup or get a consulting side-job there since there's no NDA or whatsoever to be signed (at least in my place). Plus you'll get to know in which area you should write your own software and sell it to them in the future.
That said, the people here are all happy. Employees get 22 paid vacation days a year, and the dress is casual, excepting meetings with the very high ups. There is no prototypical office asshole, and we usually have more money than people, so you have a lot of freedom to buy equipment you need or software that will solve a problem if it makes more sense than writing it yourself. It's kinda nice to be in-house and yet not have to reinvent the wheel. It leaves you free to tackle fun/interesting/non-cookie-cutter problems, rather than writing some ERP module that should be a commodity.
I also noticed that your statement regarding hardware/software is 100% correct in the university where I am working right now.