Is UC suffering from hyperbole?

A lot of fuss was raised by Cisco's channel partners after comments made at Cisco's Partner Summit by Don Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco's software group, who said Microsoft and HP were using their recently announced 10-year, $180 million UC partnership to move business away from their solution provider channel partners. ChannelWeb's Kevin McLaughlin makes the point that Microsoft and HP are very "channel-friendly," and sees the Cisco position as evidence of "hyperbole reigning" in the unified communications vendor battle between Cisco, and Microsoft and HP.

As we prepare to take an in-depth look at the unified communications landscape in mid-July, do you think the market is suffering from exaggeration of product capabilities and/or distortion of reselling realities? 

For more:
- see McLaughlin's full UC hypothesis here