I guess its horses for courses, and this is where SME shines...
I recently needed a gateway for a few workstations, just simple internet stuff + a couple of ibays. Had just pensionned off an old 166 Compaq, and what the hell, gave it a try. Beefed up the memory to 256, fitted 2 (second hands) 8GB hdd and would you believe it, SME is running fine and serving 4 workstations + a sip phones with no problems at all. And some welcome storage for backup of files with full RAID1 array. Admittedly, accessing server manager is a pain, very slow (but not 5 minutes,thanks to 256 SDRAM). Command line is "sluguish" but OK. The users do not care, browsing and pop3 are fine - the SIP phones works also.