Symlinks under Windows, finally. Or not?

Symbolic links were introduced to Windows as of Windows Vista. Yipikaye! Or not?

D:\linktest>mklink fileLink file.txt
You do not have sufficient privilege to perform this operation.

Under Windows 7 you have to have administrator privileges to create one. So if you have a D:\home\yourname\projects\pets\WorldDominator and you want to access it as D:\home\yourname\WorldDominator then your friend is not the symbolic link, but the plain old Windows shortcut.

What about projects that want to be platform independent and wait for Windows to have support for symbolic links, so some routing code could be dropped? Some pain. Windows is the only mainstream operating system that does not have support for user managed symbolic links by default. It can be configured using secpol.msc by the administrator who may or may not care.

I wish I could understand the considerations behind this decision.

And finally, should the multi-platform projects use symbolic links or not?