A good reporting solution for SharePoint Applications?

Hope everyone had a good holiday. I know the Americans did the big fireworks display for the 4th and as usual, in Canada, we had two guys in a fishing boat with a flare gun.

I've been looking at reporting solutions in SharePoint, specifically building reporting around data kept in SharePoint itself and not necessarily reporting on SharePoint but more business-specific reporting. On the SharePoint reporting side, there are a lot of great options like the recently released SQL Server Report Pack. That's great if you're looking at reporting on how SharePoint itself is doing, the site collections, how many documents are in each site, etc. but what if you want to know how well sales are doing when you store the sales figures in a SharePoint list?

If you build a business application using SharePoint and store the business information in SharePoint lists then getting the information out is like pulling teeth. All reporting tools (Crystal, BusinessObjects, SQL, etc.) need a datasource for the information. None of them can use SharePoint lists as a datasource. The closest you can get is using the SharePoint List Web Service to get the information out, but even then it's not very good either. So far the solution I'm going down is using a .NET managed reporting tool (ActiveReports for .NET from Data Dynamics) and just creating an XML datasource that represents my business objects (mostly through serialization in my business layer which isn't the best). Just wondering if anyone has any other solutions for this type of problem?