I take my damaged/unusable hard drives into a field and shoot holes in them, repeatedly. Effective and fun. You can even invite co-workers to help. Shooting hard drives is also a good way to use my old battle rifles.
Apple has indeed caught up to most other low-end server vendors as far as hardware features goes. You can get an XServe with redundant power supplies now! They've even got a rack kit that isn't an absolute nightmare! They have LOM! You can option the machines with a RAID controller, but in our case we just reinstalled on to a software RAID mirror set up by Disk Utility. Their hardware is nowhere near anything special (although their one-piece drive sleds work decently), but it's nice to see that they're at least trying on the hardware front. If they did the same on the software front they might have something.
All of this stuff is present (and the RAID controller is available) for the Intel XServe I'm using now. It wasn't (except I think you could purchase a RAID controller) for the G4 XServe it replaced. I believe some of these features showed up in the G5 XServes.
My favorite new feature that Apple added to the XServe hardware? Link LEDs on their network interfaces.
The hardware isn't "slick." It's finally "not awful."
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst