However, MS conveniently limits the scope of PHP to the single PHP download and not to the overall PHP community. The overall point I got from the MS arguments is ASP.NET: we give you more in the base distribution. Whereas for PHP you'd have to know where to look for good 3rd party classes and scripts. Personally, I'd like the ZEND folks to keep focused on the making the ZEND engine better.Some of their critiques:

It is important to note that currently no product such as the Zend Accelerator exists for ASP.NET. The binary code that is generated by the CLR is already as optimized as possible; no add-on product is necessary to achieve maximum performance. In other words, ASP.NET is providing for free what PHP users must purchase from Zend.

There are a number of free add-on optimizers as well.

It is important to note that currently no product such as the Zend Accelerator exists for ASP.NET. The binary code that is generated by the CLR is already as optimized as possible; no add-on product is necessary to achieve maximum performance. In other words, ASP.NET is providing for free what PHP users must purchase from Zend.

But with PHP you also get PEAR.

PHP provides database access through a set of built-in functions. These functions and classes must be compiled into your PHP binaries in order for them to be accessible in your PHP scripts

Unless you use a DB Abstraction library like PEAR:DB or ADODB.