You're defintely right, the .IT market is growing. In this moment internet companies are growing up in Italy.
Internet in Italy in the last years has been growing in terms of connections and businesses. It's actually curious to know that there are just few registrars around (regsiter.it, dominiando, tuonome.it) ...
The worse thing of Italian Registry rules is that is really difficult for end users to get a domain name. Anyway the DNS issue shouldn't be in the .it registration.
In a totally different point of view, an intersting thing to notice in Italian internet market is that here in Italy, there's still not a domain name "culture".
A lot of different companies in the past ignored the internet presence not registering their domain names, and actually this is one of the most important reasons why Italian rules to register a name are so strict.
I hope that these little info can be helpful, but I can ensure you that Italian market is growing up, and in the next years can be a very interesting Internet market in Europe.