"...even with the plus that is Visual Studio,... "
And you're touting things you value in VS.
I think that he poster was saying that for them the good parts of VS don't make up for other shortcomings of windows as a workstation...
I have studied the Alto and Star and I can't imagine why you would think they are similar to Windows except in their insularity.
I am not aware of any UNIX shell that offers a REPL like capability by allowing to interact with system libraries, do IPC with existing applications or system devices.
.NET, COM and WinRT play a similar role as the rich programming frameworks Interlisp-D, Smallatalk and Cedar had.
Focus on a mixture of AOT and JIT code for the programming environments, with memory safe languages. Memory unsafe languages currently used on the lower levels and performance hotspots.
An IDE with graphical debuggers and incremental development support, as the main way to develop applications.
Focus on being a good workstation OS first, with server abilities as second focus.
Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer the debugging and profiling capabilities of Visual Studio, specially for multi-threaded code?
Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer code navigation across large scale enterprise projects and architecture design?
Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer UI tooling like XAML and Blend?