I'm developing for and using IBM Notes and I mostly agree with your post, even though it's a bit exaggerated here and there. IBM is a very top heavy organisation and this shows up a lot in their software - they follow lots of fads cough Notes social edition cough and add fancy new themes on top of everything while not improving the basic product since the mid 90ies.

Lately I've been heavily involved in a project[1] that tries to improve this situation - sort of a next generation Notes based on CouchDB, with fully relational data models, extremely fast development cycles and upcoming mobile+offline clients. Mid-term we want to offer interfaces to Notes/Domino, such that migration becomes a matter of hours per application. I'm curious to see, how IBM wants to solve the inability of Notes to be fully integrated onto iOS - their announcement didn't even mention it, it rather seems like they want to sell you expensive consulting months to create each application from the ground up using their cloud platforms. Cost-wise this will be multiple orders of magnitude off of what we're trying to offer.

[1] http://protogrid.com