When will iCal and Mail on the Mac work as well with exchange as their IOS counterparts do on the iPad?

Question

To get mail to access my exchange email I have to use a private smtp server  as the passing in the settings for our actual exchnage server have never worked.  But that does at least work.  With iCal I have never been able to access my exchange calendar.  It accepts the login and appears to connect but the calendar can never be refreshed so is non-functional.
Contrast that to my iPad where I just put in my email user and pwd (for the same account as above) and both mail and calendar are fully functional (or at least so far). This is appearently due to cal and mail on iPad using OWA for everything but fetching mail.  Why oh why is this approach not taken on the mac?

Answer 1

John Galloway wrote:
OK, I'll bite.  What are these "full desktop" facilities that you don't get on the iPad?  (I have been using email for as long as its been around pretty much, but just started using email/cal on the iPad).
You're still missing the point.  The iPad uses the same code for the mail and calander apps as the iPhone.  So the code was already baked in when the iPad was released.  Thus "simple" to have the iPad connect to Exchange 2003.  Apple didn't start supporting Exchange the the OSX apps until after that and for whatever reason, decided to only go with the Exchange 2007 protocols.  Different programs and different capabilities.
I have never seen the innards of OSX Mail or IOS Mail
Not necessary to see the code for the apps specifically.  But if you've ever written any apps, particularly under a large bureaucratic environment where there are many cooks in the kitchen, you'd know what I meant when I said "...What you think can be "carried over" is a substantial rewrite to Mail and iCal.  I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it ain't as simple as you think...." 
What Apple product is competing with exchange server for email?  Sure you can run an email service on OSX...
You've just answered the question.  Apple does sell a email server product and they did have MobileMe, soon to be iCloud.  Exchange is a competing product.
...but there is pretty much 0 corporate presence of Apple servers (servers not clients) as far as I know.  And sure exchange 2003 is old hat, but what percentage of clients still connect to one?
And you know that "zero" figure for sure?  Like you know for certain exactly how many (or little) Exchange 2003 servers are still in use?  I never said that there were NO Exchange 2003 servers in use.  (I have a client still on one, so I know for a fact that it is not zero.)  My point was that Apple made a decision whether to spend the time, $$$ nd effort to add in an additional feature to their existing Mail and iCal OSX apps, which uses a different protocol, to a competing product, that is not a new product and is more than one version out and that already has a specific EOL date from the manufacturer (April 2014.)  Again, I specifically state that it's not a technical reason that it can't be done.  But if you don't understand that it's more likely to be that someone saw the ROI wasn't there, then you likely will never understand.
(You will, of course, want the last word.  Please go ahead.  I have already given you answers, regardless of your acceptance of their correctness.)