WinRT is actually kind of neat: they've taken what were before .NET-only APIs (like WPF), wrapped them in some sort of reference counting technology, and made these APIs callable from C++ code in a fairly easy ways. Reference counting does seem like its displacing garbage collection a bit, but that was true for iOS also. C# interoperates transparently.

I'm a MS researcher but I don't speak for Microsoft. That being said, I'm a big fan of SharpDX and MonoGame for my personal projects. They work well enough that I have avoided going native. Ya, I'm still a bit miffed that this isn't supported out of the box, but in practice its easy to work around.