"But Wilson played the limited resources card and indicated IE 8 will not provide SVG capabilities."

Please. M$ already has a larger budget than most developing countries. They have already figured out how to put a vector display language into a browser (the proprietary VML). SVG is a well-established standard that has been around for years (1.1 was out in January 2003!). Many other smaller companies and organisations (e.g. Mozilla, Adobe, Nokia) have somehow managed to scrape enough resources together to fund implementations. In the worst case (?) scenario, all they have to do is buy the existing SVG plug-in from Adobe, along with a couple of their developers, and ship it. Total cost? Probably less than a golf day.

Why not just be honest and say "we really, really don't like to support open standards unless are we absolutely forced to"?