It does seem so stupid that they don't fully support the standards. Its their one chance to unite with the rest of the internet and they choose not to because its not being done their way. I think they are stuck in some time warp. Things are moving fast and people are not afraid of change anymore. We have Firefox instead of IE, we have linux instead of windows. We have PHP instead of ASP and MySQL instead of SQL server.
There are some Microsoft products that I do like. But I've realised over the past year just how flawed IE6 is and it saddens me that they haven't bothered to update it and sort those problems out. I'm waiting to see what IE7 is like. But the problem remains, there are hundreds and thousands of people out there who are stuck with a Microsoft Browser. They don't know about Microsoft Updates so they are spreading viruses etc.
Maybe WC3 takes things further than needs be. But it would just be so much easier to develop a website if I didn't have to spend so much time writing hacks to enable all browsers to see it.
Sorry I get quite worked up about this!