I (we) am not thrilled with the change in direction either. OS X Server has been a constantly improving product with each version until 10.7. Generally we see it as a disappointment as well. The move to the Server.app is incomplete at best. Unmentionable at worse. Apple's dumming down of the management tools in no way helps with Enterprise adoption or even small business adoption. Server went from a relatively rhobust set of tools in Snow to garbage in Lion. Asking anyone to edit apache configuration files in 2011 is a sad sad reality. Even hosting providers provide web interfaces.
Its really disappointing to know that some of the Lion Server apps only work with 10.7 (which ***** the big one IMO).
The sad reality is that you will be better off using the Contacts solution in iCloud (provided you are all Lion and iOS5) then trying to use the Address Book server in Lion Server.
I think 10.7 and its server will be the death of Mac sales just like Vista did to MS. Snow Leopard was a fantastic OS but there is a good chance it will go out like XP.
I don't think I will go that far. Lion client will be (and in many cases already is) a large success. Sure Apple still can't figure out how to make 802.1x authentication work smoothly, nor can they make VPN easy to configure for non-admin users. And the whole deprecation of MCX and move to configuration profiles is currently a half-baked joke. But these are criticisms for those of us foolish enough to continue to believe that these products are ready for enterprise deployment. But that is not the abjective anymore. If it happens, fine. But it is all about the consumer experience. That is what is driving the products at this point. Home users and other places in which each machine has only one user will never experience these brick walls.
It is a real shame to see this change. Over the years, we went from being the dirty secret that companies tolerated in small niche departments, to being generally accepted and permitted into the network, to now being considered first class (or maybe 1 1/2 class) citizens on corporate networks. What the future will hold is unseen. But if Lion is the start of a direction, then server will not exist much longer. I actually think I had better management tools in AppleShare IP.