I strongly agree! When I was first thrust into Notes administration (version 3 no less!) I hated it. But combined with version 4 and using it more, the power hiding behind the ugly GUI became more and more apparent. I've yet to find a system that can handle unstructured data or workflows with field level replication, role based security and encryption as quickly or as elegantly as with Lotus Notes - UI warts and all. Indeed I have some workflows that I could probably automate myself in a week or so but am in the process of getting dev support to accomplish some other way.

It's too bad IBM didn't really fix the non-windows feel of Notes until version 8. By then Exchange had clearly won - should have never happened. The Notes server back end is still far more robust than Exchange. Oh well...