I can't speak for the other products but yes, this new release is fully supported by Oracle. You can find details on the support offerings that cover both Sun/Oracle hardware and third-party hardware here. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html

No need to do that. Oracle Solaris 11 Express runs very well on x86 systems as well. In fact, it's a lot more scalable as a single-node system than many other OSs and the driver support in the new release is much improved over earlier Solaris release.

Yes, it's a commercial product. And like many commercial products, it's available free for evaluation or for use by developers. However if you wish to deploy it on your production server, you should be obtaining a support contract (which if you're serious about production is probably a good idea anyway.)

To be clear, you can use the release for production purposes but this requires a support contract. This is not unlike many other commerical operating systems or for that matter, other software products. For more details on the support offerings, see the links from the main page http://bit.ly/dkhwZ6. As for the other restrictions, many of them are similar to again other commerical products - they're not be redistributed by third-parties, etc.

Can you provide some examples of specific patches and the specific applications that broke when you applied those patches? Solaris has a strong track record here but I'd love to know your details so we can resolve the issue.