Too true. I haven't turned on my R720 in over a year because of all that.
But I will say that anyone that actually wants to play with the PowerEdge stuff should look at the R2X0. I have an R230 that idles at around 40W with a couple simple VMs running. Nice way to still get the iDRAC/enterprise experience while staying relatively low power.
Which Dell did you have? Their XPS line are pretty good.