Matthew Turland started an excellent series analyzing Magento features. Part 1 looks at the analytics and reporting features offered by Magento. Here’s the part where Turland discussing the logging of admin actions:

Some time after the initial release, Varien began offering an Enterprise Edition of Magento. One of the differences between the Community and Enterprise editions is that certain features are limited to the latter. Generally, a company that takes this approach will limit paid-only features to those that have high value, but are also supplemental in nature. Ubuntu, Zend, and MySQL are good examples of such companies.

In the case of Analytics and Reporting, this restriction applies to logging of administrator actions. I don’t understand what the reasoning behind this could be. Whether security is the feature’s primary intended application or not, it can be used for that purpose. Security is a very real, very serious concern, and users should have tools available to them for monitoring their storefront activity.

In Part 2 Turland anaylzes the product browsing features within Magento. Here’s a segment about the product option selection feature

The relevant user guide section for this feature appears to be outdated, grossly oversimplified, or both.

The feature is accessed from the Custom Options section of the form for editing products. Its purpose is to allow administrators to add custom price-affecting options to products (such as size for shirts) and to allow customers to select those options before adding products with them to the shopping cart.

Overlooking the lack of documentation, the implementation of the feature itself appears to be logical and well-organized.

So far, both of his analyses seem thorough and unbiased. It’s a good set of articles to read if you’re considering Magento as you can read his reporting and make a good judgement knowing what your own needs from Magento will be.