I have to say, I've used NTBackup on W2K, and it's not the greatest by quite a long shot. Working w/ tapes is a hassle from the GUI, and I'm not sure that a restore would actually work.
Doing a backup can be tricky. I've had reasonably competent (non-expert) techs attempt a backup, and not get any data into the backup, yet the backup says it completed successfully.
Restoring from files is tricky--I've had to do it a few times for EFS data recoveries, and unless you use exactly the right sequence, it won't restore data, and it dumps you back to the GUI.
Compression is non-existent. For example:
Data = ~64MB docs/spreadsheets/etc
Windows Backup = ~67 MB
Zipped Data = ~17MB
That said, if you're on a budget, you take what you can get. I would agree with Saltin--Do your primary backup to HD rather than tape.