Rick Strahl on ASP.NET AJAX
Rick has a very extensive post on his blog about the state of Atlas today. It's a fair and complete look at what the technology is today and what it will become in the next few months. The post is a great read that I personally enjoyed a lot because Rick is hard to please and well, he seems to be mostly pleased (which doesn't mean that we don't have a lot to do before we release, working on that).
http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/7551.aspx