As you may have already seen, Microsoft has just announced it has closed its acquisition of DATAllegro:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-16DAPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

More details will be forthcoming at the BI Conference, CTPs will be available in the next year or so and the product is slated for release in the first half of 2010 (for SQL2010 then?). It'll be interesting to see what form it actually takes exactly. As I've said before I suspect it would be easier to get Analysis Services working with this technology than many people think, and I also still wonder whether MS might also be thinking about buying or building a column-oriented database too.

As a counter to this euphoria, here are some interesting links... First, take a look in the discussion in the comments here:
http://www.dbms2.com/2008/07/24/how-will-oracle-save-its-data-warehouse-business/
Plenty of people with an axe to grind, I'm sure, but some points worth considering. Also worth checking out for a dissenting point of view is Kevin Closson's Oracle blog, which discusses DATAllegro a few times, for example:
http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/i-know-nothing-about-data-warehouse-appliances-and-now-so-wont-you-part-ii-datallegro-supercharges-fibre-channel-performance/

It's always good to take the blog-equivalent of a cold shower before getting too worked up about a new feature or technology. I'm sure that the guys at MS have done their due diligence on DATAllegro, and that come 2010 we'll have a solution that is way, way more scalable than what we have right now, but let's also set our expectations appropriately - it is going to be a version 1.0, and the competition isn't going to stay still in the next two years either.