> what does TS still bring to the table for people who aren't using Visual Studio?what does TS still bring to the table for people who aren't using Visual Studio?

It doesn't require Visual Studio. Most major IDEs and some text editors have support either from Microsoft or the developers of the IDE/editor[1].

Also, strict typing (which I consider a huge plus for any long term large project to help make it sane).

I think it matters (though maybe not for everyone) that Anders Hejlsberg (of Delphi and C# creation fame) is behind the architecture of the language.

> no real JS API

Not sure what you mean by that, please clarify. JS notation works fine in it (since typescript is just a super set of JS and typing is optional). If you want to add types to a JS library, you just build an interface for it. Lots of examples of how to do that out there[2].

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Edit...

[2] https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped