I've noticed that Hotmail's spam filtering has improved significantly in the past year or two (I still have an old Hotmail account). It may be 7 years to late to compete with gmail for new customers, but it's nice to see these improvements from Microsoft.
An added benefit of this is Exchange customers can take advantage of what Microsoft has learnt from filtering Hotmails spam by using FOPE (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/forefront/cc540243) as a cloud based spam filter. It's amazing how well it works
