As you probably know, MS released WinFS Beta 1, which runs in WinXP! Check the team blog for some interesting information. Quentin Clark gives some hints on the direction that ADO.NET is taking.
On the other hand, the subscriber downloads page in MSDN does not suck anymore! the left-side tree is loaded on demand and you can have a 'My Content' filter which makes it easier to manage. However, the 'Microsoft File Transfer Manager' is still the same, and keeps telling me I don't have enough free space even if I do...
SQL Server Mobile 2005 can be run in any Win32 box, but the licensing terms only let you use in Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs.
This kind of licensing stuff is quite annoying for developers, that don't like 'artificial' constraints when using software products.
Additionally, SQL Server Mobile looks like a very interesting solution for single user data in 'Occasionally Connected Applications'. It's much lighter than SQL Server Express, it has very good replication support, it's has a good query processor, etc.
So, please, can you let us deploy it on any platform?
Thanks!