I agree about your msbuild points, in fact I don't think it's that bad of a build system and just under-utilized (hidden, for the most part/most users, behind the shiny GUI tools).

Access times: According to the comments on that blog entry (and according to all search hits that I could find, see for example [1]) atime is already disabled by default on Windows 7, at least for new/clean installs.

1: http://superuser.com/questions/200126/are-there-any-negative...