My hypothesis is that winning over developers to use their platform will eventually result in more Azure users. I get the feeling Azure will be their one of their next cash cows, and this is one of the steps in enabling that.
With the free W10 upgrades for 7/8 users and a 30% cut of Windows Store sales, they stand to make some money. But they have to get developers back on their side first, otherwise the store stays dominated by garbage.
They're also supporting Objective-C now, with VS slupring up Xcode projects. Did not expect that one.
I haven't paid much attention to native apps either desktop or mobile. I've built my career understanding distributed systems/communications flows and web based fromt ends... To me most of that is a better experience than what little attempts I've made at front end platform development.
Though I will say that Azure is all about getting you to use non-VM services, to generate lockin to their platform.