Thanks for the perspective: I haven't heard VS given as a reason before. It's probably a consequence of the bubbles I've been in, but for every dev I've ever met (incl everyone in my CS program), there wasn't any advantage to Windows for development and disadvantages everywhere you looked. This may be a consequence of the devs I know (esp the good ones) skewing towards having a CS background (though obviously most of them aren't computer scientists in industry).
(Of course none of this applies to personal computing, where I still don't understand Windows usage beyond the need for niche software).
I was on my 2nd CS year when Slackware 2.0 was released, and we had big boys UNIX on the department, like Aix and DG/UX.
Yet the majority of lab computers were running Windows 95/98.
UNIX was mostly used for the OS, compiler design and distributed computing classes.
Everything else, including graphics programming was on Windows.
I remember following KDevelop progress hoping that one day it could eventually match what I already had available in Borland and MS tools.