What I meant by "respect standards" was things like giving a warning if there is no new line at the end of a file, not accepting templates unless they are in the form "template <typename TYPE>" (the VS compiler lets you omit typename). I'm not sure which extensions you're talking about but every extension in GCC I know of is marked as such with a prefix. I think you'd find it hard to argue that the VS compiler is more standard compliant than GCC (or any other for that matter).

I know that you can have most of the GNU toolchain available under windows using cygwin. I use it quite a bit when I work under windows. I assume that the average windows game developer doesn't use these or he would find developing under linux very familiar (which hasn't been my experience while working).

The VS debugger features you mention seem to be compiler features rather than debugging features.

Now, if you're arguing over these details I'm afraid you missed my point: game developers aren't having a hard time developing games for linux because gdb doesn't support stepping from managed code into semi managed code. They are having a hard time because they aren't used to the tools available in linux. I wasn't saying the tools under windows are bad, rather that, as a linux developer, they can be as hard to use as my tools are to a windows developer.