That may be, but that attitude pushes away prospective developers. When I was a budding programmer the only way I knew of to access a C compiler was to use the GNU toolchain. But getting it to work on Windows was enough trouble that I just made the move to Linux. It's been ten years now, and I've never looked back. It's Microsoft's loss.
Microsoft does actually give a way a lot of development tools for free including compilers. The only thing they don't give away is their IDE. Even in that case they do give away versions of it that are only somewhat crippled but still very usable.
