Jeff:
As usual great to hear things from the horse's mouth as it were, but just wanted to respond to what you've said. This is in no particular order and entirely off the top of my head.

You say that people aren't interested so much in the kernel but more in the services provided. I agree with you to a point. The kernel does matter to people. The reasons it matters are in terms of performance. A poor kernel (be that in terms of speed, memory management, I/O performance, stability or whatever) passes on its defects indirectly to whatever runs above it in user space. This is one of the main reasons people switch from less free kernels (including Netware) to Linux. It has a profound impact upon TCO, which for suits is the bottom line, and uptime, which is one of the key points of interest for techies.

Please be careful singing the praises of ZENworks. Many people who have installed SUSE 10.1 have experienced problems with this package. Now, I know that updates are being tested and becoming available but it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. My advice to anyone using 10.1 would be to abandon ZENworks/YaST for software management and updates and use Smart (included in the distro in the smart-* packages, or you'll do better to grab Pascal's packages and get some channels pre-configured).

I hope you know that when you use words such as leverage people find it hard to take the rest of what you say seriously, irrespective of how much sense you make.

All that said, always good to read what you have to say.