The new IE is actually pretty good. Microsoft knows that IE6 is an abomination and even made a website dedicated to its demise: http://www.ie6countdown.com/
My point regarding 9 is that the developer tools are buggy and painful to use compared to chrome. As a web developer, you would want them fixed as soon as possible.
MS has tons of development tools available internally that they don't release to the world. It's possible that what you're wishing you had is sitting out on Toolbox, invisible to anyone outside the firewall.
There's something of a culture of "our internal developers are smarter than our external developers" at Microsoft, so dev tools are often where the dogfooding has been the weakest. It comes from having internal developers who are hacking on things like OS kernels while the external developers have a massive population of coders churning out enterprise CRUD forms (along with a smaller population of more advanced developers), but this internal/external tool gap sometimes really bites them.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting. But I got the impression that dev tools that qualify to be sent out into the world need to have a primary emphasis on friendliness, automation and autogeneration, and general polish. By contrast, internal tools need to be industrial grade workhorses, and if you can improve them by putting a better interface on them, that's merely nice. One of the clearest examples I can think of is the difference between their internal workhorse Source Depot and their public tool TFS (nevermind the horror that was VSS).
Like I said, I might be misreading things. And certainly the blogging community around their dev tools has improved the level of detail that goes out to developers committed enough to keep up with them.
