As a SoftLayer customer of ~5 years, this has me pretty bummed. I'd hate to see SoftLayer's straightforward product offerings get subsumed by IBM's enterprise-driven culture.
I've only used their services for a short while as they bought a company I was using, but they seem hard working.
They have a massive control panel they wrote completely in-house and there is a heavily documented API for 3rd party access which was an nice indication of a good attitude.
