While I definitely won't be using Visual Studio for web development (it just doesn't feel right to me), I wouldn't say Visual Studio is an awful product that should be avoided. Compared to VS 2005 (remember those days?), VS 2012 is far faster and much less of a pain to use. For anyone starting out with web development who has used VS before, it would probably work fine and suit their needs.

That is, unless your projects are giant. Then you might start running into a bit of unresponsiveness, but nothing worse than Sublime Text or comparable editors.