Call me an MS-loyalist, but the functionality just isn't there for many corporations.

I did not call you anything ;-) and I agree that the linux world lacks functionality in some areas- especially the visual tools that DBAs and Sysops have learned to expect in the rich Windows world. But many/most Linux apps now have apache extensions for visual management via a browser. MySQL certainly has a comprehensive set of visual tools.

but I know people who have looked at products like MySQL and just find it lacking.

Rod P wrote an article about MySQL a while ago at a time when it had no Stored Procedures. Rod of course is one of those who says he always uses SPs (as of 2006, anyway) so MySQL without SP is obviously going to lose from that POV. Now MySQL has stored procedures/functions, but as I mentioned earlier they don't assist scalability and don't offer the rich featuresets seen in SQL Server. Meanwhile changes in parameterized query handling in SQL Server have also reduced the scaling advantages and there seems to be some concern about SPs growing in power and annexing the business layer. As always, I assume the truth is somewhere in the middle, not that we'll discover that until a few milliseconds before the next great thing is unleashed upon us. ;-)

FWIW, selection of database hasn't been an issue for me since about 2000(?) when I persuaded a customer to move to SQL Server from another flaky C/S system. We're using both MySQL and SQL Server in the office today.