You could see this in the Autos window in earlier versions, too. Although maybe only immediately after shift-F11'ing out of a function, and not of multiple levels of function calls like the linked article shows.
That's a great feature which will actually help avoid creating local bindings just to easily see the value.
You can also reference register values (e.g. rax) in quickwatch and cast them to the appropriate type.
and the fact that you've had to do that since I was using VC6 in 1995 is the indictment.