Hi Justin,
with the gerneral replication to non-ABAP DBs as a target we made some good movements and got a lot of experience within the last year in customer projects. Despite that we do not plan to release it with the next SP version unrestrictedly because we did not test all available setups so far. So we cannot brand it as out-of-the-box working from a legal perspective. Anyhow when you have a scenario with the replication to non-ABAP just conctact us, ususally we did with the common databases already some customer projects and can enable it without any efforts.
For the general strategy it is planned to release it unrestricted with SP9 mid of 2015. Technically it is alreay working.
When I talked about non-ABAP DB it is only the DB's that are supported by NW (Oracle, MS SQL, IBM, ASE, MaxDB, Informix). All other DB's are only supported if the SAP basis team would deliver a library that allows SLT to connect to this DB. Hadoop is not include - unfortunately we are dependent on this team and their strategy.
Best,
Tobias