A bit too late IMO, I wish we had this in SQL2000. We have rolled our own SP for doing that. Yes, it definitely would have been great back in 2000 or even 2005. So many developers wound up writing their own solution with a one-row, one-column control table, or variations of that.
Several enhancements in 2012 would have been even better back in 2005. Another example: in 2012 they added an OFFSET/FETCH after an ORDER BY to supporting paging. Last time I saw an execution plan, it was no faster than using ROW_NUMBER with a subquery or CTE (the common method in 2005), but now there's no need for a subquery.
IMO, the single biggest enhancement in SQL 2012 is the columnstore index and the biggest enhancement in 2014 is making the C/S index clustered and read/write.
