I don't necessarily think that's a fair question. If I were to start a big-name consumer app today for Windows, I'd choose C#. But most of those types of apps have a long history that either predates .Net or predates .Net being all that great. Because of this, even a lot of Microsoft's apps are still written in C++. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft would completely rewrite say Office in .Net if it could do so without losing decades' worth of code.

That's a good question. Lots of corporate intranet apps are written in C#, but it's hard to tell what consumer apps are, since it's not something that companies advertise.

For what it's worth, we do know, however, that .NET technology is an important component of all games made with Unity.

Indeed. I was surprised by this statement in the article: "Contrast this with the most prominent competing desktop platform, the Microsoft .NET framework and C# language on Windows, where memory-managed code is the default and everything else is considered risky, literally being denoted with the "unsafe" keyword in the source code."

I've been doing development with .NET/C# for the first time for the last six months and I was surprised to see that the default mode for development is unmanaged. Do any big apps actually use managed mode?