Re: nullptr
When we started the Dev10 planning process 'nullptr' was still under active discussion by the C++ Committee (it is funny how sometimes the smallest features can take up so much time) and we didn't want to risk having the feature change as we were implementing it (or worse change after we had shipped it). We also felt that the overall benefits provided by nullptr weren't signifcant enough to warrant spending effort on it - we felt that auto, lambdas, rvalue-references, decltype, etc. provided much more "bang-for-the-buck". So yes your reasoning is at least partially correct.
Jonathan Caves
Visual C++ Compiler Team