"But losing the SAN is just as likely as losing any normal server."
Patently false. Statistically, SAN's that employ 2 or more controllers have significantly lower failure rates (by at least an order of magnitude). SAN's are designed with no single point of failure (SPOF). Dual power supplies, dual (or more) controllers, passive disk back-planes, etc.
Not to mention that they allow for better space utilization. Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is very wasteful of disk space that cannot be reclaimed because it is locked to a specific host.
I acknowledge that a SAN does not make sense in every case, but to claim that they have a failure rate comparable to a normal server is just plain wrong and misleading.