> But the whole point of WSL is that I can use the nice GUIs available on Windows.

I think the point is that you can have a linux environment on your windows machine without running your own VM, not that you can use GUIs for your platform back end. If I just wanted GUIs I would use Mac OS. The real godsend of WSL is that we poor souls who are forced to use windows machines at work can finally have a development environment that isn't a second class citizen (assuming you aren't a windows platform developer). I'm not sure that it's fair to say that WSL doesn't solve anything for anyone just because it doesn't fit your workflow. I run node, haskell, and python in WSL and VSCode remote development extensions provides me with a full featured IDE for each of those environments, along with git integration if I should need it. Usually I just open up a terminal when I need to use git. Anyway, the next version of WSL will host a full linux kernel, so it should be easier to use X forwarding if you need linux-native GUI applications.