The March 2007 edition of MSDN magazine has a nice article on the new features of IIS 7.0. I love and applaud this:

The centralized configuration store of the previous IIS releases, known affectionately as the metabase, is gone. IIS 7.0 features a new delegated configuration system based on a hierarchy of distributed XML configuration files.

But I cannot help but think .htaccess, and wonder what took them so long :-)