Very interesting points and ones that we agree with for the most part. We started out filling gaps in Lotus Notes, enabling teams working offline to replicate Lotus Notes databases client to client. Over the years we’ve come to realize the power of Notes for many customers. Microsoft could not touch it. However, like you, many customers are re-evaluating their decision in light of Sharepoint, in particular the upcoming v3 release.

Unfortunately, as you’ve pointed out, sharepubt suffers from poor offline support. And I’m not sure that outlook 2007 or Groove will provide an adequate solution for mobile workers at companies that want to make Sharepoint the centerpiece of collaboration. They need offline support but will have to change the way they work if they use other tools, like outlook, to go offline since the collaboration models are different than sharepoint. This is fine uf they need a few documents but not adequate if the company uses rich metadata and lists to drive business processes.

You might want to check out our review of the offline sharepoint capabilities in Outlook 2007 at our blog at http://www.offlinesharepoint.com.