Juniper switches - Where's the beef?

With Junipers long awaited release of their EX switch line, many have said that there is just nothing distinguishing about the line up.  Just speeds and feeds.  Others are saying that the real secret sauce is the JUNOS.  That very well may be.  However, Tim Greene in this article says that Junipers built in NAC may be Junipers not-so-secret weapon. He quotes two analysts, Phil Hochmuth of Yankee Group and Rob Whiteley of Forrest-er.  The article rightfully points out that Junipers competition in the switch market is Cisco and HP ProCurve. 

It then goes on from there to talk about Junipers new ability to perform access control at layer 4 with identity based access control with ACLs in addition to VLANs. You can perform QoS as part of a users access rights and they can mirror traffic and send it to a Juniper IDP for post-admission NAC. Juniper wants to evolve NetScreen Security Manager into a central policy-control platform.  This is all great stuff, however it ain't new.  My research shows that HP ProCurve (the 2nd leading switch vendor) actually does much if not all of this right now. Using the ProCurve IDM (identity driven management) application which is now bundled on ProCurve's NAC appliance  with their NAC application, they can do this already. They can do the QoS thing as well as sending the traffic to several IPS brands.  In fact a close reading of what ProCurve's security capabilities show that there is little if anything ground breaking in what Juniper is advocating and what these analysts seem to be eating up.

Yes, Junipers entry I think does spell C-O-M-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N for the likes of Nevis and ConSentry (sorry Dan and Dom), but that is not what Juniper is in this game for.  They have to keep their eye on the prize. And the prize is taking market share from Cisco and HP ProCurve.  If this is all they got, I am going to have to agree with those folks who are asking Juniper "where's the beef?"