Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".
They won because they appealed to the true buyer in the office; the CTO or VP of engineering, but they really appeal to the control-freak and micro-manager.
When I used Fogbugz in one office, it was the devs that pushed for its use and the project managers and other execs weren't able to screw it up; there was no obvious way of creating custom workflows or locking things down too much. Fogbugz let us get work done. JIRA in the hands of a micromanager makes me want to chew glass.
In progress could mean anything from writing specs, ui design, dev or testing
Micromanagers can screw anything up - you can invent some pretty insane workflows using the FogBugz workflow tool, if you want to :)
They pay people to convince other companies to buy their product. The claim of "no sales people" stems from the fact that they only talk to people who contact them, rather than cold-calling.
This is, interestingly, also what the sales team at my company does. They are pretty sure they're doing sales, though, so we call them that.