No, no they're not. See, I used to think the very same thing. But then, we were migrated to Lotus Notes three weeks ago. Now I love Microsoft, and want to have its babies :C
Is it multi-task-able yet?
I haven't touched it since I left IBM over 3 years ago, and the biggest annoyance for me was that while it was accessing my mail database, it locked up notes and there was nothing else I could do inside it, despite having 5 pages of other databases I used during the day. God help us if the connection was iffy, as it'd lockup for 5 minutes or more, and I couldn't even access the replicated local databases while waiting.