Nik have a whole bunch of developers and resources working just on SEP and I doubt Adobe can match that as they have to develop the rest of Lightroom too. SEP is actually a very clever program with 1000's of hours of testing and development which is why it is considered to be one of the best B&W applications out there. If Lightroom had the 'power' of SEP it would probably cost twice as much too. Adobe have to balance the costs as not everyone wants that sort of control for B&W and won't want to pay for it either.
I have just upgraded to SEP v2 and its a great improvement over version 1, especially the interface which is far more slick.
Having said all that, if Adobe put these features in Lightroom 4 and it still only cost $99 to upgrade then I would be very happy
I would be much happier though if they improved the management of the images. Collections are so limited they have driven me back to Aperture at present.