What have we been promising for years now?

Okay, fair point. There was no promise, per se. It was more my expectation that a progressive community developer like Jelsoft -- that came on the scene and totally "rewrote" the way forums worked (I used UBB prior to VB) -- would take so long to adopt something as basic as blogs and move beyond the age old forum paradigm into even basic social networking features that were proving to be the "next wave" for several years now. So, expectation, not promise. I agree that's wasn't fair of me to call it a promise.

Though not directly related, I did wait a long time for the official VB CMS that was announced and seemingly took forver to ship. I'm assuming it shipped... I stopped using VB before it was released. ;)

Since I have your attention, any thoughts on those other points I made? They were the main reason for my post.

There are no plans to restrict access to vBulletin for sites with topics that compete with other IB companies, or to add additional functionality to the IB communities that is not included in the product. It’s more likely that any custom code created by IB for their vBulletin communities can also be integrated into the product.

All of these tools IPB has can be gotten for vbulletin either free (gallery) or a soon to be release (blogging).

Just a note.
IP.Board does not come with blogging, or a gallery. It costs extra to add that. However, IPCommunity which is their bundled community software includes IP.Board, IP.Gallery, and IP.Blog all into one suite at an extra cost. There is nothing wrong with this, but someone might misunderstand and think that IP.Board comes with all that you said, when it doesn't.