I really think if they had document-level locking, it would be a much more successful DB. 10gen's answer to this is "just shard!!1" except that sharding in Mongo really isn't as easy as they make it out to be...not to mention what database makes you shard just so you can support more than a few hundred writes per second? Maybe this has improved a bunch since I got burned by it on v1.6, but I believe it's very misleading to claim scalability of a product that has a global write lock. Being forced to shard when you reach the small-medium size is just sad.

All other aspects about it I love, though. It really makes development and deployment so much faster. Replica sets aren't perfect, but setting up MySQL replication w/ automatic failover on three or more machines is a recipe for disaster unless you have a DBA to sit there and baby sit it full-time.