>The simple fact that you need Xcode's SDK and homebrew/macports on a machine to get anything done outside of Xcode speaks volumes for using Mac's as development workstations (or, specifically, MacOS).

What does that even mean (besides being incorrect)?

How is the situation different in, say, Windows? Can you compile C/C++ stuff out of the box?

Or Linux, for that matter. In a lot of distros, gcc, make and co have to be installed -- they are not part of the default install.

As for the incorrect part: you don't need XCode. You can just install the "command line tools" package from Apple, that contains compilers, headers etc.