I can’t even count the number of times over the last 9+ years that I would have been thrilled to have symbolic links (symlinks) in Windows. After all these years it looks like I might finally get my wish, the Windows Vista/Longhorn NTFS filesystem is supposed to include symlinks. Beyond that the new SMB2 network filesystem protocol is supposed to include support for this.
This is another situation where even though Microsoft is doing the right thing here by adding a feature that their system needs to have, many folks will be laughing and making fun of them for it. Why? Well, the FreeBSD symlink(2) manpage claims that it first appeared in 4.2BSD, in 1983. It is rather hard to save face while explaining that it would be more than 20 years later before Microsoft would get around to including this feature in their filesystem.
This makes you really reconsider the wisdom of the saying “better late than never”.