Or, they are great at making it seem easy and cheap, and then pile on the hidden costs (e.g. Visual Studio 2010 Pro is $799 or Sql server dev editions is free, but need an enterprise edition, that’s $15,000). And of course you have to buy the their OS to run it. Oracle runs their DB business in a similar way.
There are open source tools for developing on Windows, you know. Not just Visual Studio - there are all kinds of free dev platforms for any language you’d like.
You can use SQL Server, or MySQL or any number of databases.
Freedom for developers is pretty darn nice!