Small business that can't afford dedicated IT usually outsource to a consultant or MSP, who damn well better sell them on Pro.
If you can't afford proper licensing as a business, I doubt you're gonna make it
I have friends in the SMB consulting space - ALL of their clients run Pro, with at least one DC. Their smallest clients are 2-3 person environments.
A business needs a lot more than a workstation or two - backup, security (IDS/IPS/firewall/spam filtering), email (pretty much all hosted these days). You're not doing this without pro licensing. You can't even use Group Policy on home.
These issues truly only affect home users - specifically the non-technical. And that's such a small set of people it's almost doesn't matter to MS, which is why they're pushing this crap there.