As an "insider" working with MSSQL at least 8 hours a day no need to worry, text is going to be there at least for five or more years..... there are several professional applications that require it extensively.
To make things worse, varchar(max) implementation - "forced and recommended" by MSSQL - performs very badly, so there are some peoples with real problems switching table definitions.... Beware of some idiosyncrasies with the text type .... comparing, sorting, grouping, etc support is limited. Although for MSSQL >= 2005, I advise to switch now to varchar(max) and nvarchar(max): poses no problem at all (and restore complete functionality "compared" to other engines "text" type). The only "real" problem is for MSSQL 2000: varchar on it is limited to 8000 characters, so varchar(8000) it's the max you can get. Last but not least, every row in MSSQL 2000 can't exceed ~8000 bytes.... means that creating a table with two fields of varchar(8000) is not allowed. NB: The same applies for MSSQL 2005: you can't create a table with two varchar(8000) fields, but the restriction goes away with varchar(max)... actually the limit achieved with that is ~2.1GB for every single row.
