A family of Microsoft relational database management systems designed for ease of use.
"SQL express conversion is extremely expensive for complex DBs and provides a substantial performance reduction."
That is a valid observation.
It all depends on the database. The main issue is that often, applications (using an Access backend) aren't designed for client-server usage, as is the case of you start off with the intent of using SQL Server from the start. So, yes, the conversion and further optimization can be time consuming, therefore costly, depending on the complexity of the application being converted.
That said you do gain on reliability, security, ...