Linux does the same with bad RAM, and you'll often see that in large installations. (Monitoring should check you have the number of DIMMs and CPUs expected, modulo a fiddle factor for reported memory size, which depends on BIOS.)
Yes, considering ZFS was originally developed by Sun for Solaris. It's been 8 years since I've been a Solaris admin, but we ran production DB workloads on JBODs with ZFS with no problems.
Though I've not run ZFS on linux myself, I've heard that many of its issues stemmed around the fact that due to CDDL/GPL incompatibilities, they couldn't have ZFS in the kernel until very recently.