Kind of true, but the common use of distributing binaries means that one can also take care to modularize the application across lib, DLL or COM modules, thus reducing even more what actually gets compiled from scratch.
Naturally one can do that across UNIXes as well, they just historically seem not to have invested that much either in incremental linking nor in a proper pre-compiled header model, hence no one really uses them. At least that is my perception.
In any case modules are in now, so lets see how they evolve.
