Being a new Red Hatter, I actually admire the policy of "upstream first". If it aint' in upstream kernel or Fedora, it isn't entering Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Isn't that wonderful? It means no matter what distro you use, Red Hat's contributions reach you.

Fedora is a sincere attempt at a working desktop. It has several people working on it to make it as stable as possible. A lot of developers out there use Fedora -- which means it's ready and good enough for them. BTW, what makes you think you aren't beta-testing anything else you're using? Not just ubuntu, *any* software out there? Which software comes with any sorts of guarantees?

You're way off-mark.

- libvirt: It's in active development by the community (which includes people from companies other than Red Hat as well)

- Amazon's EC2 cloud service is based on Red Hat servers (running Xen)

- KVM is the virtualization platform Red Hat is moving to from Xen. They've invested a cool sum in Qumranet to get the management solution.

- In fact, Microsoft is late in this business -- the features and stability they offer aren't close to what Red Hat offers right now.

However, it's going to be a level playing field soon and ultimately the war of hypervisors is going to be like the war of operating systems -- and no doubt free and open is going to win.

In India, here: http://www.idasystems.net/.