My only question is - what about the "safety" of those that prefer Red Hat-based (CentOS plug!), Debian-based, or BSD-based (excluding Suse / SLES) distros?

Wow, another plot by ms to avoid monopoly lawsuits. Very smart on there part. I wonder how long it will take till they slap lawsuits on the other linux players. It may be a ms/novell/sun world pretty soon.