Agreed.
I would have expected them to have exposed at least the following features in the object model:

• 1) Map rotation
  2) GPS info (all of the stats that are reported in the nifty GPS pane)
  3) Location Awareness
  4) Voice Prompts/Route

Several other weaknesses in the old 2K4 version also remain unimproved.

Well, I guess we are lucky at all that we even have MapPoint 2006.
I heard last year that they were going to stop development of the MapPoint desktop product.

Pv