All that glitters isn't gold. Wake me up when Microsoft makes a serious effort to make Visual Studio a cross platform development suite.
We all know the only reason this exists is because Microsoft has little traction in the smartphone market and app developers won't target their hardware. If Microsoft phones were the market leader they would not give two fucks about portability.
Sounds like a serious effort to allow you to develop native iOS apps in VS instead of xcode. You're right the motivation is heavily to minimize the cost of porting/releasing iOS apps to WP/Windows.
(Speaking as someone who knows the folks behind the project) Actually, the reason this exists is because Peli, Nikolai and some other folks wanted to create a way to program your phone using only the phone (i.e. how do you make apps for your phone if that's your only device).
At the rate Microsoft has been releasing open source code and porting .NET over, I wouldn't be too surprised to see Visual Studio geared towards cross-platform development. They did already launch "Code" which, admittedly, doesn't hold a candle to VS. It looks to me like they're slowly releasing more and more framework tools so that VS running on OSX could actually be a possibility.
We all know the only reason this exists is because Microsoft has little traction in the smartphone market and app developers won't target their hardware. If Microsoft phones were the market leader they would not give two fucks about portability.