Hey I won't defend Microsoft's business practices but one thing Microsoft is very good at is integrating products and services. The other thing is making these products relatively easy to setup and use. These are their real strengths.
The fact that someone with no real IT experience can setup a reasonably complex network (ie. Directory services, DNS, etc etc) is a major accomplishment. Unfortunately the downside is that inexperienced people also tend to make a meal of it and you end up with some nasty lookin networks.
When everything works it works really well... it's when it doesn't work then that's where you have problems.