test it in the lab eh? Yeah right.... Gone are the days when even largish companies have a lab that even looks vaguely like what they actually have running or the staff to run and maintain one. At best its some creaking old collection of cast off routers & switches

speaking as a cisco bigot, I agree. This sounds like a risky, ill-advised venture from Cisco. Might happen, but I'm not betting on it...

I tend to agree, as a long, long time cisco guy, I'm of the opinion they kind of suck at "soft" software. They do a bang up job of hardware centric software except when it comes to the GUI front ends (although the pix/asa asdm is not too shabby - finally catching up with Checkpoint & kin after all these years). I guess the debate is this just really good X86 hardware running Windows/Linux with a Cisco label or is Cisco going to throw some great value add?