Well, that's a facetious argument if I've ever seen one :). .NET does a lot more than just interface with COM or the Windows API. VB (pre .NET days) had much better integration with OLE/COM and the runtimes were like 1mb in size at worst.

I've always thought of COM as one of those almost brilliant pieces of technology that somehow got completely ignored. Of course, it's still commonplace in the Windows world, but the concept facilitates reusability so much, it's a shame it wasn't adopted by other platforms.