> Question is what stopped MS to just wrap this NVARCHAR with json validation and json access and give it as json type

A large part of the blog post [1] is dedicated to this issue?

> In SQL Server 2016, JSON will be represented as NVARCHAR type. There are three reasons for this:

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jocapc/archive/2015/05/16/json-suppo...