IBM i and System Availability?

I keep seeing articles touting high availability and the IBM i OS!  Lets get something straight here.  An IBM i cannot run 24 x 7, nor does it have the ability to participate in a cloud like environment and have a second machine assume its workload if it goes off-line. 

LakeView, Vision, and other high availability vendors can replicate data to a remote machine, but failover to the remote machine with synchronization has a best case of 45 MINUTES.  This is an eternity in today's world.  It is not possible today and never has been possible to keep two or more IBM i based machines in synch.

You must take you IBM i based machine off-line to apply many APAR's or PTF's and many require that you IPL the machine.

You cannot use SQL's ALTER TABLE command to change a database table unless SQL has exclusive access to the database.  This means you must shut down you interactive and any other systems (like web or web service based access) before making a change to a database.

Most companies must shut down their web applications, interactive applications when running nightly batch update programs.  This is not a machine issue but bad programming by most AS/400, iSeries, and IBM i vendors and in-house programmers.

Bottom line is that it is simply not possible for an IBM Power System running IBM i to provide the high availability demanded by today's business applications.  In a global universe when can you take your machines off-line?