The biggest club Vista-Bashers have wielded up to this point just got a little bigger:

...we are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release. With most of our effort now working towards productizing mature aspects of the WinFS project into SQL and ADO.NET, we do not need to deliver a separate WinFS offering.

In other words, the XP-backport of WinFS won't be happening. In fact, it doesn't look like any end-user release of WinFS will be happening; they're dispersing the technology into other products. If you've ever gotten your hands dirty with smart folders or mdfind in Mac OS X, you know what a boon a new database-filesystem would be for Windows. I've got 200 gigs of backups, photos, and documents on my Windows PC, and I can never find anything.

I guess it's "C:>"-prompts, backslashes, and asynchronous cataloging for the long-haul.

Via OSNews.