The LINQ language feature set is not replicable so easily in C# 2.0 code, without extension methods, lambda expressions, and even without the query operators. The whole point of LINQ is that you have some integrated version of queries where you use compiler for sanity checks of them. The other crucial point is the unification of view at different datasources, whether it's a database or in-memory collection. You can live without LINQ, just as you can live without any other feature of the language and code in Assembler, but there are obvious advantages that are hard to oversee ;)
