I noticed that as well. I run Ubuntu, which could be part of it (although that's not to say Ubuntu's not a little bloated as well). Just to test this, I opened up every program that I could think of which I use on a regular basis:

  - Firefox, with 20 tabs
  - Skype
  - Pidgin
  - Three terminal windows, running Python, vim, and CherryPy
  - Songbird
  - GIMP with a photo loaded
  - Two OpenOffice Writer files
  - Geany (a text editor) with nine tabs
  - Nautilus
  - Three large PDFs (books) using Evince Document Viewer
  - System Monitor (not much)

And I'm only at 1.2 GB! (No swap, out of 2 GB total.) I rarely have all of these programs open at once, either.

While I agree with his point in general, it might be overall more effective to avoid relying on apps as bloated as Visual Studio. Then, you can save some of the money on computer upgrades and avoid any negatives that might be associated with developing on a high-end computer. (Of course, I'm a moron for suggesting that there might be any.)