Win32 is beautiful when compared against Xlib, Athena Widgets and Motif.
Win32 covers a lot more than xlib, athena and motif. And still I have to resort to porting over bits and pieces from the FreeBSD C library because in a pure win32 project (no msvcrt), things are missing.
The thing is, getting all the details right requires extensive research and a lot of extra nonsense that shouldn't be necessary. For compatibility, accessibility, consistency, etc. Sometimes it's amazing things work at all.
Plenty of details documented across MSDN and Technet, and these old technology called books.