My sarcasm may have been too subtle there; I definitely think it's a bummer that you have to own a Mac to develop for iOS.
You don't need eclipse.
You can get by with Emacs, JDK, and ant. Plus the Android SDK of course.
That's how I roll, and it works just fine.
You don't need to sing up for develper program to start hacking for iOS. But if you want to run your code on real device or make it available in App Store you will have to do that.
Setting up new Mac is really that easy. You can just launch Mac App Store application, press a button to download Xcode and when it's done lauch the installer.
> Android is a bit more involved. You can download the SDK easily, but to actually start writing code, you’ll want to setup Eclipse and install Google’s ADT Plugin.
Buying and setting up a new computer is "Easy!" but installing Eclipse is "more involved"? Having to sign up for a $99 developer program is omitted. The size difference, of a couple hundred mb for Eclipse vs 4gb for Xcode is omitted.