Just seen this from Joel (via twitter).

A micro debate has ensued on twitter and although it pains me to admit defeat (about anything) I must agree with Andrew - to be true SharePoint "master" you need to be able to cover both IT Pro/infrastructure and Dev. This pretty much rules me out as I simply do not have the time to dust off my old dev skills and brush up on .Net/SharePoint OM/etc...
It makes for a good debate though, compare the SharePoint MCM with Exchange (etc) MCM and the SharePoint program requires broader skilled people, but then the product is broader (and much more interesting IMO), this is running (light hearted) debate I have with one of my colleagues (he's an Exchange guy): that Exchange is just email, SharePoint a rich business tool.
Myself and James Butler conceived a way of negating Exchange and replacing with SharePoint, it was late in a bar in Seattle (but that's a post for another day)...

I can only think of a few UK guys who would meet the criteria, e.g. Andrew Woodward/Liam Cleary, maybe a couple of others, either way it should be tough, it's the premier MSFT SharePoint certification afterall ;)

But then, arguing with myself, do you actually need to know detailed dev to be a good architect? I don't think so... I certainly don't get into detail on the dev side, knowing what is possible, sensible and viable is what architecting is about - designing a solution that affords the best compromise between business requirement, technical strategy, UX, security, and (of course) cost/time...

External links:

http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0cd1a63d%2D183c%2D4fc2%2D8320%2Dba5369008acb&ID=128

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/11/10/introducing-the-microsoft-certified-master-and-certified-architect-for-sharepoint.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/master/SharePoint/default.mspx