I've actually had the opposite impression; I couldn't believe how little Windows actually came with for development. While I'm not a fan of everything that com

I've actually had the opposite impression; I couldn't believe how little Windows actually came with for development. While I'm not a fan of everything that comes with the Mac, I've never felt that it had any gaping holes like Windows does (e.g. Windows doesn't come with SSH or Perl or Python or even a reasonable shell and terminal, much less other useful utilities). In fact, sometimes the Mac has almost too many options; the Mac ships with something like 5 text editors, and that's before realizing there are excellent 3rd party ones too. It's clear that Windows can be made tolerable with some effort, but I've sort of lost patience with having to do what a company with Microsoft's money should be able to provide by itself. My last exposure to Visual Studio was version 2005, and it started with the realization that the program was basically incapable of saving to the previous version of its own file format (which completely threw off my version control on a project where all other team members were stuck with older IDEs). I also remember with disdain opening Visual Studio 2005 and being given about 15 characters of space in which to type a series of "#include" search paths; I kid you not, it was faster to mount a network drive, open Linux and "vim", and edit the project XML file directly, than it was to futz with Microsoft's poorly-thought-out GUI to perform the same tasks. I'm willing to allow that I've just had some bad experiences, and I hear so much praise for Microsoft's environments that I constantly feel like I must just be missing something. Yet everything I've seen doesn't make me think "snappy", it makes me think "kludgey, buggy, poorly-conceived mess from company with enough money to do much, much better".