T minus 9 days: Justifying the Enterprise License

(Great, now I have to blog every day...)

At the last North Texas SQL Server User Group Meeting (NTTSUG), it was mentioned that Enterprise Edition IS SQL Server while Standard Edition is merely a stripped-down version of it. So why would you not employ SQL Server Enterprise in your environment? Cost. A Standard license is roughly one-fourth the cost of Enterprise Edition and could be worth the savings if your applications don't require the Enterprise features (you can find a "Features Supported by the Editions of SQL Server 2008 R2 article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993.aspx).

But let's consider a tiered environment where you have four SQL Servers for development, testing or user acceptance, staging and production. If my reasoning is correct
(and please set me straight if I'm off base), a Standard Edition tiered installation would require four Standard server licenses. That cost should equal one Enterprise Edition server license provided you are working with the same number of processors. Now hang in with me here; Microsoft offers a SQL Server Developer Edition which is Enterprise Edition (bells, whistles and features) with "special licensing" (around $50?). Couldn't you use the Developer Edition server licenses in all of the non-production servers and Enterprise Edition server license for production?

Two factors that I can think of might burst this thought bubble. First, Microsoft may call "foul play" and state that the Developer Edition is purely for development; not testing and not staging. Second, Developer Edition may not entirely be congruent with Enterprise Edition and if that's the case, all of your development, testing and staging could be really risky to migrate if it deviates even slightly with Enterprise Edition in production. Otherwise, this theory could be a way to truly justify working with the fully featured version of SQL Server... right??

As always, comments, rants, corrections, rebukes, and attaboys are welcome.