[rodgerd]

I can easily see at least one use: we have some outsourced dev work. It is painful to get them up and running because we have to set up remote desktop with everything that goes along with that, simply in order to let them edit code and run builds.

I imagine MS/GH will be selling to people like us the idea that we can simply make our GH repos the dev environments, and so all the access controls which we apply for managing interaction with the dev environment get us the appropriate dev environment for (effectively) free, and we throw out the desktop VMs.