Is a Samba PDC a reasonable choice for small business?

I recently had somebody ask me for advice about setting up a Samba PDC for their small business with 5 Windows Vista PCs. The owner is not very technical, and just wants something that is "set and forget". After doing a trial run with Ubuntu Hardy and hitting one barrier after another, I recommended that they go for Windows Server 2008 instead. Now I'm second-guessing myself, so I want to ask the community:

Would you recommend Samba to a small business owner?

There were a few factors that swayed my decision. I'm interested in whatever workarounds may be available for any of these issues.

• Windows 7 support is not great. Downgrading security settings, DNS errors when joining a domain, and failed machine trusts in 3.4.0. Not what I want to see in production.
• Out of the box, Samba doesn't support ACLs. It seems like a lot of extra configuration for something that you get "free" with Windows and NTFS.
• Windows DNS server automatically resolves names registered in DHCP. But in my BIND9 configuration, everything has to be entered manually and statically. That seems terrible.
• A Samba domain only works at the NT4 functional level. If the client ever wanted to upgrade to take advantage of new technologies, I'm not sure that they would have a reasonable upgrade path.
• Active Directory allows delegation of rights, particularly on user accounts. I don't believe there is anything like that in Samba.
• Group Policy would help keep the environment locked down, as some of the computers will be in a publicly accessible area.

With Samba 4 still way off in the distance, it seems hard to justify a new deployment using technology that is nearly a decade old with basically no upgrade path.

Solution 1:

I guess this is really a subjective question, so I'll give a subjective answer...

Maybe. If the business owner had the inclination and or support staff to work through the technical issues, then it may be a good way to go.

But in this case, no I wouldn't. I would suggest either Windows Server Standard or Small Business Server, whichever better met their needs.