Yes your'e right that the compiler != the IDE. The compile time should be attributed to the compiler, of course, but VS has a habit of invoking the compiler unnecessarily, even if no source has changed.

I don't really use the WYSIWIG aspects either but all aspects of the UI seem slow and cluttered in my experience. And whether or not you and I use those aspects of the IDE is somewhat immaterial. It is called Visual Studio after all and touts the visual designers.

My point regarding the specs of my dev machine were that it is a fairly decent, new machine and the load being placed on it really isn't that high. Comparatively I run XCode on a 4 year old laptop with 2GB RAM, slower disk, slower processor and it is far more responsive. (And FWIW the compiler is faster too, especially now they are using LLVM).

When I say the IDE doesn't make a difference to the level of polish you can apply to an application what I'm trying to say is that if you're writing mostly textual code as I do too, then the IDE doesn't really factor into the polish of the application. Although, I suppose I'm contradicting myself as if I'm more productive in XCode then I have more time available to polish, so there is an indirect relationship there :P

At the end of the day, they're both decent tools and and everyone will have their preference. My comment was really just because a lot of people have started using XCode in recent years, having moved from VS due to the "iPhone effect" and I see an awful lot of comments and posts about how much better VS is, and my experience contradicts that :)