It is significantly better than express editions though
What's it offering that Express didn't? I haven't followed this particularly closely but it looked to me like it was mostly just about combining the languages so you don't have to get each one separately. I'm guessing they've chucked in a bunch of the preoductivity features as well but they generally did that with each new revision of express - they generally just trailed a revision or two behind the paid version.

I personally don't see this as MS giving up anything that was making them significant revenue before. They've made life easier for small developers but they were mostly using express anyway.