I saw a link on Rob Caron's blog to Eric Sinks article Comments on the pricing of Team System it is a really good read.

I think he is both right and wrong about the size of dev team for which VS Team System will be useful. I totally agree with his 8,000 developer analogy but not with his 5 man team one. Why? Because I work in a seven man team and we developed an enterprise system that our customer has paid £1million (~US $2million) for. Our annual salary bill is £250,000 if by purchasing VS Team System and training the team to use it (more costly than the licence I suspect) we realise a 10% improvement in efficiency then VSTS easily pays for itself inside two years.

There will also be business benefits to our customer in terms of predictability of delivery and confidence in a successful release. As a manager of other developers I want to be able to track everything they have been up to when things go wrong, this is especially important when a new member joins the team. If I have this information I can use it to correct mistakes to get the release out and to explain to the developer what they did wrong. I need end to end control over the development process to make sure no one in the team can get lazy and not be held accountable.

I'm not sure yet if VSTS (sounds like a venereal disease!) will offer this to a dev team like ours but if it does we will gladly pay the price being asked. My main concern and something I am struggling to find information on is how SQL 2005 development will be integrated into the VSTS development process. Currently this is a headache for us as it is totally manual and we use VSS.