.NET Hype Is Just Old News?

Y'know, I kept hearing from a bunch of profs at school and some of the people I work with about how the ".NET Framework" is this great big revolution. Thinking "OK - if it's really so great it'll be worth knowing at least some of the basics" I got a giant "Programming Visual Basic.NET" book with a Visual Studio.NET demo (for $0.50 at that - the book was damaged stock our company was selling). I started reading it last night, and the first thing the author does is explain all these shortcomings of the old COM and COM+ models. As I read through it I thought "yea, that explains a lot, but man... Microsoft really blew it with COM, things like perl, PHP, python.. even Javascript have those features that COM is missing".

Thing is... the apparent reason .NET is such a major "revolution" is that it ummm... basically does all the things good languages like perl, python, php, etc have been doing practically since they were born... so.. wait.. you mean the .NET hype is that .NET does all the things competing languages figured out years ago like garbage collection and freedom from having to rely on a central nervous system (the registry)? Apparently. It has a few things to offer the web programming world it would seem, but nothing that perl and PHP haven't already solved in one capacity or another, and certainly the improvements it offers in that arena don't justify the price tag.

All that being said, does anyone else have any opinions on .NET? Has anyone else looked at it or used it? I'm sort of amazed at how "average" .NET is after reading about it thus far. Of course, for Windoze programming, it's revolutionary because it offers inheritance and encapsulation features that were missing or poorly kludged in the old COM model... but still... give me a break.... I could just use Java if that's all it offers.