Yes, with Apple's Boot Camp drivers it actually makes a very nice Windows machine. I used to run Windows in a Parallels VM under OSX, and that worked well for a while, but at some point my OSX installation started getting very slow, and Parallels even slower.
So I started using Boot Camp more and found it to be very snappy. Also I was doing some VR work on Windows, and that only works on physical hardware. (The MBPR is not a great machine for VR, but it's good enough for the system integration stuff I was doing.)
The only hardware issues I've run into compared to running Windows in Parallels are:
* Apple's Ethernet dongle is not hot-pluggable in Windows like it is in OSX/macOS. A reboot is required if you want to plug it in. You can plug and unplug the Ethernet cable on the fly, just not the dongle itself.
* By default, the trackpad two-finger scrolling works in the traditional "scrollbar" style (swipe your fingers down and the display content moves up). I prefer the "natural" style where it is more like using a touchscreen. I found an easy registry tweak to fix this on this page:
I didn't use any of the other tweaks on that page, just the scroll direction.
* The touchpad driver is not as good as the one in OSX. Specifically, it's much more susceptible to false right clicks, and it's fussier about the style of click-dragging where you hold the touchpad down with one finger and drag with another. In OSX this works pretty naturally; in Windows it works only if I hold the pad down at the left bottom corner and then drag with another finger.
* And of course, I miss the TrackPoint from my ThinkPads.
The finishing touch was to get one of these Windows logo decals to cover up the Apple logo:
Serious question as two people now have mentioned Bootcamp "drivers", and I've only ever gone the other way (Hackintosh) - why do you need Apple drivers to install Windows on what seems to be a perfectly normal x86 machine?
A little late on this, but in case you're still paying attention... Windows will work, but won't be able to use all of the hardware, since it's not all standard stuff. This Apple support article mentions various bits that won't work without the drivers: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204923
It's basically the same reason you'd need custom Windows drivers for any hardware. It's just that in this case, it's Apple hardware.
So I started using Boot Camp more and found it to be very snappy. Also I was doing some VR work on Windows, and that only works on physical hardware. (The MBPR is not a great machine for VR, but it's good enough for the system integration stuff I was doing.)
The only hardware issues I've run into compared to running Windows in Parallels are:
* Apple's Ethernet dongle is not hot-pluggable in Windows like it is in OSX/macOS. A reboot is required if you want to plug it in. You can plug and unplug the Ethernet cable on the fly, just not the dongle itself.
* By default, the trackpad two-finger scrolling works in the traditional "scrollbar" style (swipe your fingers down and the display content moves up). I prefer the "natural" style where it is more like using a touchscreen. I found an easy registry tweak to fix this on this page:
http://waded.org/2013/01/15/perfecting-trackpad-scrolling-in...
I didn't use any of the other tweaks on that page, just the scroll direction.
* The touchpad driver is not as good as the one in OSX. Specifically, it's much more susceptible to false right clicks, and it's fussier about the style of click-dragging where you hold the touchpad down with one finger and drag with another. In OSX this works pretty naturally; in Windows it works only if I hold the pad down at the left bottom corner and then drag with another finger.
* And of course, I miss the TrackPoint from my ThinkPads.
The finishing touch was to get one of these Windows logo decals to cover up the Apple logo:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014I1ICX8/
So now my MacBook Pro is officially a WinBook Pro!