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I think it was Joel of StackOverflow who wrote that that was not the case at all. His statement was that MS would have loved to give away Visual Studio, however they wanted to make sure there was a viable 3rd party market for developer tools. They didn't care what you developed with just as long as you were targeting Windows. Visual Studio pricing was designed to create a price floor that any third party dev tool company like Borland could rely on.

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The reason for not keeping it freely accessible doesn't matter. It's either freeware and some hobbyist or student can easily get, or they cannot.

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MS dev tools were freely accessible in the same nudge-nudge-wink-wink way that Adobe tools were. I don't think I ever attended a LAN party where people weren't trading cracked versions of the best MS had to offer. And MS never lifted a finger to stop this process. Hobbyists and students had access to everything MS had to offer and often wanted to keep using them in a professional setting.