Emphasis on Office 2010 hindering Duet Enterprise implementations?

In a blog of Venture Research I read the following rumor: "…about the partnership with Microsoft in Duet Enterprise, which my sources say is not advancing as fast as desired because many organizations are not anxious to upgrade to the latest release of Microsoft Office, which is necessary to derive the true value of Duet. This caution by organizations to update their underlying platform has good reasons in terms of cost and resource constraints, and SAP is not able to do anything about that."

If true, I find this a misconception and incorrect positioning of the Duet Enterprise potential. Surely, it also provides a Microsoft Office 2010 clients connection. But the true strength and potential of Duet Enterprise is that of a standards-based SAP / Microsoft interoperability foundation. It comes out-of-the-box with multiple integration plumping capabilities which you otherwise need(ed) to implement yourself. And being a commercial product, Duet Enterprise is backed-up by both SAP AG and Microsoft Corp as strong and future-proof IT suppliers.

That said, the implementation of Duet Enterprise puts its demands on the software server infrastructure in your company: SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition at the Microsoft stack, and NetWeaver 7.02 at the SAP stack. These are minimal necessities, without the availability of the both of them Duet Enterprise is not an option. But Microsoft Office 2010 at the client side is merely a bonus, not a prerequisite.