good point. StackOverflow used physical boxes not virtual servers and that certainly makes scaling a database easier. On the other hand I currently host HireFlo on a single Rackspace cloudserver. I have 3 web apps, a SQL server instance, and 2 processors hosted on the same VS and it's working well so far. I'll definitely move SQL Server off to it's own box at some point though.
I agree. I used to do classic ASP, which at the time was a great web dev platform. I really think Microsofts priority with Webforms was to convert all those VB6 programmers over to the new framework, not build a better web framework. I've hated webforms from day 1. I'll dance on it's grave.
Regarding the language doesn't matter thing I think that's mostly true. If you're choosing between Ruby and ASP.Net MVC I don't think you can loose. But sometimes the framework does matter, like if you want to build a startup on webforms (don't).
BTW, Azure is a nice scaling solution but it slows initial development way down, it's a pain to debug, and it locks you into a single hosting provider. Not a good solution for me and I think it's crazy that Microsoft keeps pushing it as a platform for early stage startups.
Visual Studio, especially when paired with Resharper is a tremendously productive dev environment. C# is a fantastic language and it's got a host of new features that make it possible to write in a more functional style, stuff like lambdas, expressions, type inference, dynamic types, anonymous types.
The main problem is that people don't think about any of that when they think about .Net. They think about that festering bog of evil and spaghetti code that is WebForms.