I was hoping that this was their direction! At our EHX get together in March, Rick and I talked about .NET architecture quite a bit...
I think this is a excellent step for the product and would be willing to pay the full price of the software again for a properly engineered .NET solution.
With .NET's remoting, web services, asp.net, and ado.net it will be very simple to create stellar systems. I would love to look at their full architecture.