I'm going to jump into the fray as a big Brother fan-boy. I have a number of their network laser printers, and the 8890DW as well. I think its unfair to compare them to the Canons or Xerox machines and especially to the Muratec, which can top out at a cool $10K --- for a multifunction...golly!
For about $300, the Brothers are a great deal. I have been running a Brother network laser printer (5250 I think) continuously since 2007, almost 55,000 pages printed, still making an excellent print. In the same time, I have junked multiple Oki's, HPs and Canons. Compare a Canon multifunction to a Brother 8890. Canon costs a few bucks more, wired networking, but the Brother is wireless also. The expendables for the Canon are $30 to $40 per toner cartridge more, and only print 3,000 pages to the Brother's 5,000.
You have to look at everything you want to use the multifunction for, not just whether it scans to your server. The Brother software is made for a peer-to-peer workgroup, and the software on each peer is rock solid and easy to use. I can fax from every workgroup computer through my 8890, and it saves the faxes sent to it until the line in open, if an incoming fax has the line. Try getting the Fax Server Role set up to do the same thing on Windows Server 2008, and tell me which is simpler to configure and keep operational.
IMHO, Brother doesn't want the headache of writing compatible software for Windows Server 2008 -- its not their target market.
