Never tought I'd say this but since getting my new job and since Java is not any safer than .Net for the moment I have been toying with C# and it just frankly feels like a better language, esp the Linq part.
(Now, before anyone starts a big project in C# remember you are going to get punished all the way from start to finish. License for OS, for dev environment, no choice of dev environment, when you have bought VS you'll have to add resharper. Then you hopefully come to deployment where once again you have no real choice, Azure or self-hosting on, guess what, MS servers which again has to be licensed. )
Its not exactly as you state with the licenses. Most (perhaps _all_) organizations/corporates use Microsoft products and have existing licenses. Acquiring more would not be issue in these environemnts.
If you are a start-up, the right way to do it would by joining the BizSpark [1] program. .Net does provide an excellent development and scaleable environment. This program grants you access to all of its products, including Office, SQL server, Visual Studio and a multitude of other applications/tools. There was a recent post on HN [2] that spoke more to this.
(Now, before anyone starts a big project in C# remember you are going to get punished all the way from start to finish. License for OS, for dev environment, no choice of dev environment, when you have bought VS you'll have to add resharper. Then you hopefully come to deployment where once again you have no real choice, Azure or self-hosting on, guess what, MS servers which again has to be licensed. )