Honestly, this makes me reconsider my future OS choices. I've been an OS X user for a decade now, but getting increasingly dissatisfied with Apple's stance on hardware and software, I have been thinking about moving to Ubuntu for a while now. The problem with that though is the scarcity and quality of commercial software builds on Linux. My biggest pain points are the Unreal Engine and Unity3D IDEs right now, which technically have Linux builds available, but in practice they just don't work.
With the availability of Unix command line tools (and maybe even GUI apps) on Windows, this becomes a very viable platform for me as a developer. I'd still be throwing away most of the software I purchased for OS X, but at least Windows equivalents are available.
If Microsoft is indeed courting programmers again, this is a smart move.