Wow, that's fantastic. My queries are littered with that type of construct. Unfortunately, we are using SQL Server and Microsoft hardly ever makes any developer-friendly enhancements to T-SQL.
True enough... I can't even begin to wrap my head around the XML wrangling functions in T-SQL, I feel like a n00b copying JS methods for jQuery when I go there. That said, it's probably one of the easiest RDBMS servers to administrate for small-medium sized deployments.