Am I mistaken?
Other than the way you load data in, what's the difference, though? It's just an implementation detail.
You can periodically build a read-only cube that has pre-computed answers to any number that any pivot-table could read from that star schema.
Then, when the multinational supermarket CEO queries for his company's total profit by product line over the past five years, he gets an instant answer.
The other way, the CEO must wait for weeks to get that answer from the RDBMS - or the cube must be replicated the cube inside the RDBMS somehow using tons of materialized views.
I think that's Microsoft's advantage in the database market: their system has all the tools out-of-the-box.
And the licensing's really not that expensive - especially compared to the heart-attack inducing prices coming out of Oracle, IBM, SAS, Teradata, Kx etc etc etc
To answer your questions, SSRS pre-2012 didn't work for non-IE users. In 2012, it works like a charm, though. As for debugging in SSIS, if you're talking about script tasks, again, they fixed it in 2012. Debugging data flows is pretty easy, too--I've never really had a trouble except for the script tasks.
As with any Microsoft product, there are a plethora of quirks that you just have to know about (or a quick googling will tell you), but I've never felt my dev time was stunted because I was using SSIS instead of Informatica or Talend or something else. These things all have their quirks, so none really bother me over the next.
Anyway, I'm not here to fly the banner of SQL Server. Microsoft, sadly, doesn't pay me royalties. I use it, it's a decent tool that does what I need it to do, but I do work on too many different platforms to really care about one or the other. My point was to give context and other info about what SQL Server is.
It's a good list for web apps, though. Certainly things you want to think about when building a web application. Especially pessimistic concurrency. I think a lot of web devs have no clue what concurrency models are. I cannot tell you the amount of `with (nolock)` arguments I've seen over the years.