Your post is very interesting because it raises important points about Pentaho strategy.
First, let me tell you that I am in a french company (Atol CD) that sells service on Pentaho since 4 years...
We started doing this with Kettle, one of the full brilliant ETL open source (Talend Open Studio is another one) and we do the same for the Pentaho BI server Community Edition since 1.7.
This leads me to several thoughts :
A/ On our way, we contribute to the promotion and the implementation of the Pentaho platform (Kettle & BI Server), but we never sold any enterprise version...
The reason for this was that until now there were only little difference between CE and EE versions.
(As you write in your post, it's possible to do the same dashboards in 3.0 EE and with the Pentaho CDF)
B/ But I agree with Matt: Having another nice OLAP option available to EE customers is a great thing !
In this case, as an OSBI integrator, I could play my full part and there are 2 options:
=> 1: sell service and training for customers who want the benefits of the CE version without spending money (buy server licenses)
OR
=> 2: sell Enterprise Edition for customers who wants a very nice full package and allow Pentaho to earn money because of the quality and the richness of its product
Pentaho's business model is clear and perfect in my opinion, we should just remember one thing, the CE version should always present the same basic features as EE version (Unlike Jasper...)
James Dixon is absolutely right in sayings "The open core model only works if the open source software is full-featured and valuable".
It's a great thing for the future of Pentaho and those who use it
