Well Microsoft has "officially" announced, at least on the Exchange Team blog, that E14 (next version of Exchange, after 2007) will support Public Folders 😦
Why am I sad? Well Microsoft has been saying they are going to stop supporting Public Folders for MANY years but they haven’t. Public Folder do work well at some things but SharePoint 2007 is a better solution for MOST things PFs are used for. So we (Exchange MVPs at least) had hoped MS wasn’t going to support PFs in E14. Now that they are, MS will have to support them for 10 years after E14 is released (support period for Exchange).
For more info see this Exchange team blog post.
Related blog posts:
The 1st link above is important since Microsoft currently doesn’t provide any tools to help people migrate from PFs to SharePoint.
The 2nd link goes over some ways to mitigate the issue that SharePoint, out of the box, can only host data at one physical location. Multi-master replication is something PFs did pretty well.
Jason (Izzy) Sherry's Blog 