In today's world, what is the role of the Application Server?

Undoubtedly, you noticed a few changes in the Enterprise world:

1) Sun bought MySQL for a reported $1B

2) Oracle bought BEA for a reported $8.2B

I've already been asking this question to various individuals, with these recent announcements it occurred to me that I'd be interested in what you, the blog reading public have to say.

My question is this:

Given the likes of Spring and Hibernate, how do people consume the Application Server? Is it all you can eat with JEE still delivering on the promise of writing business logic and letting the App server deal with the infrastructure? Or do things like Spring, Hibernate, JPA etc. change the game - are people choosing a best of breed approach, with lightweight frameworks (Spring, ActiveMQ, Hibernate etc) and lightweight containers (Tomcat, Jetty etc) allowing developers to build the stack they need, and no more?

How do the acquisitions mentioned above change the game? Is BEA still delivering value, or is the App server market completely commoditized?

I would love to hear your comments!