I think major difference here is that Microsoft actually tries to play nice with the existing ecosystem

- Follow EcmaScript6 development path

- Using NodeJS as the base for the language service

- Providing plugins for various editors

- Be superset of JavaScript - you can (almost) directly drop any JS code to TypeScript

After all these years it almost looks like Microsoft has learnt its lessons and sees there is more than Windows Server out there.

Actually my major grief is that they are using Microsoft's Codeplex software repository services which feel little old fashioned and cumbersome after all Github hipstering :)

but they use git as well, so you could easily set up a mirror on github.