Yes, it can run on Visual Studio, but in principle it is not tainted by the "give me a job" C#/Visual Studio/.Net mentality.
As such, F# developers could consider avenues and form communities which are taken for granted in other environments (Unix, Python, Ruby, etc).
There's already a tremendous(but small) community behind F# . I've never seen a question on F# go unanswered in most popular forums. With the start of F# foundation and open-sourcing of F#, I am confident F# will survive even if MS drops the ball.
The taint on F# is that it's a Microsoft language - that's enough to make some people never consider it, and that's okay. That baggage is historical.
I wouldn't say "wrong", but certainly the fact that C#, in most people's minds, is glued to Visual Studio (and .Net), is more to the advantage of Microsoft, than to the society.
This is an honest question, I've always been curious about the open-source CLR world. It seems like there's a much larger disconnect than there is with the JVM.
By the way, Mono has a C# interpreter and parser (Mono.CSharp, Mono.Cecil) which do (did?) not have a counterpart in .Net, so in that sense at least Mono diverges from .Net, rather than being behind.
The Microsoft "tax", in every sense of the word, is anethema to at least grass roots popular expansion into open source, if not to its principles.
Successful or well-known .Net programs are invariably closed source (#). In addition, of the large .Net open source projects I have seen, almost all are entirely developer related.
(#) One notable exception: Keepass 2.0!
