^I completely agree with your statement. No commercial customer will use it for mission critical non-supported systems. But a lot of what is being consolidated via virtualization is not mission critical. And many people will still do their own testing and find out that they have workarounds to get stuff working.
And my point was merely that the article states that Linux is being left out in the cold, when it is so clearly not. Most Linux distros work, and one is even certified. As time goes by, more will be. Note also that this is a server product - which means they will look to certify server versions of distros. So while OpenSUSE might never be listed as certified, don't you think that it would work seeing as how SLES does?
As for BSD, let me tell you that MS is a lot more benevolent towards BSD... One problem with Linux is the GPL. MS doesn't want to touch GPLed code with a ten foot pole. In such a scenario, they might actually depend on third parties to develop the integration components for them (the Citrix/Xen guys provide some support in terms of their hypercall adapter). They don't really care about releasing the code for the integration components to the public (doesn't really cost them anything), but what will stop some of the fanatics from claiming the entire hypervisor needs to be GPLed and claiming it is a derivative work (even when it clearly is not)? That slashdot article has an "informative" post which says that Hyper-V does not perform full hardware emulation - when it does!! In fact, it is probably the only VMM solution that does so. Try running VMWare workstation with an unsupported guest (or even a supported one) which does not have VMWare tools installed (Ubuntu has it by default now, but some distros might not). You'll probably have problems with resolution (at least I used to, but I now only use Ubuntu as a guest and it works great). Whereas with Hyper-V, you don't. You can run at high resolutions without installing the Integration Components.... If people can't see this, do you really think they'd understand anything about the architecture, and therefore the licensing?