Alex,

>What about having the ability to create components in any of 19 obscure languages that haven't been used for anything but to torture college students for the last 20 years????

An interesting question to ask is how much of the syntax of all those 19 languages has to change for .NET. Do they lose capabilities? I don't know the answer, but it's an interesting question to ask.

IOW, don't assume that all the ports are easy or full-function or provide backward compatability. I imagine their main usefulness is in easy the porting of legacy code.