Sun is an interesting company, Solaris is an interesting OS. There was a time when I would have completely agreed with your above statement. I work for a CS department at a Canadian university. When I started in 2003, the last of the Sun workstations were on their way out, replaced with a mix of Windows and Linux boxes. (Mostly Windows.)
Fast-forward almost six years, most labs are looking for a combination of Windows and Ubuntu. Linux is especially popular for number crunching where 32bit OSs can't go, and suddenly Sun servers and workstations are looking good again. We recently purchased three X2200s. They came with 16GB of RAM and can be easily and cheaply upgraded to 64GB RAM. I cannot get this from clone makers and Sun's prices were spectacular. The three systems will be running Linux, Windows X64 and Solaris X64.
Of the three, I will be using the Solaris server. I consider myself a Linux guy first, but Solaris is an incredibly stable OS and even Ubuntu LTS and RHEL aren't as reliable where I need them to be. I _need_ the NFS server to be perfect. I find every release of a Linux OS, even "enterprise" versions, to be a little strange in this regard. Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS has odd autofs bug that interacts strangely with NIS and NFS and may or may not be realted to udev somewhere. It's an aknowledged bug, the workarounds (one of which I suggested) are just that. Cannonical doesn't seem to be quick to fix the "problem" and why should they? I haven't paid for it, and NIS/NFS/autofs isn't their focus. Fine, but I need it. Sun does this right, every time.
I was rather shocked when I read about Toshiba preloading OpenSolaris 8.11 on some laptops, but I've used OpenSolaris. It's a nice OS. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of the latest version of Ubuntu, but in typical Sun fashion, what it does, it does well.
I administer servers, some Linux, some Solaris. It is very convenient for me to have a well-supported laptop running the same OS as my servers. I, for one, will be quite interested in a Solaris-based Toshiba laptop. Sun doesn't sell laptops and their customers need something. While this seems a little odd, both Sun and Toshiba have much to gain with this announcement.
In the past, I have been worried about Sun's long-term prospects, but OpenSolaris looks like a huge step in the right direction, they've finally opened Java, they own MySQL, OpenOffice is the only viable MS Office competitor, and now they are on the cusp of having a decent laptop option. And this is just on the software side. On the hardware side they have very competitively priced servers (never thought I'd say that) with great expansion options, their support and build-quality are worth at least the small premium they charge, and if you need SPARC (it still happens) they are the only game in town. On top of this, they run Solaris, Windows and Linux with full driver support, guaranteed.
"At my company the last enterprise Sun box went away almost 18 months ago. We're pushing Linux to supplement our AIX systems now. And Linux excels. It's stable. It's supported. It's cheap. And it's doing what the Sun box did for $50,000 more."
This is great, but you should check out Sun's x86 servers, run Linux if you prefer, have Solaris as an option for free. The website prices are not even close to what they offered us. Much to my surprise, I think that anyone buying anything that will be running as a server should check out Sun's prices. Seriously, we just bought 2xquad-core servers with 16GB of RAM for a quarter of what we paid for a V440 four years ago, and that was a 2-for-1 deal at the time.
Honestly, Sun seems pretty well positioned to me, and this is a very interesting announcement.