I think the reality is even more interesting than that: Apple has won, but MS is in the position of being able to do whatever they want, so they can chase after

I think the reality is even more interesting than that: Apple has won, but MS is in the position of being able to do whatever they want, so they can chase after any developer audience they're looking to capture. Thus, they're adding clang integration, and an objective c runtime, and a way to run 'universal' windows 10 apps on xbox one, a rearchitected browser with modern js (asm.js!) and modern platform features (webgl!) etc etc etc. They just want devs to put their applications on Microsoft platforms, they're letting go of the desire to control every part of the platform & developer experience. Compare this with how Apple has been aggressively pruning and scoping down their dev tooling, it's a pretty interesting contrast. They insist on controlling everything from beginning to end, which results in problems like not being able to build executables that support older versions of OSX with the official toolchain.