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Oh come on guys. If you're serious about developing for the system, installing the new version of the OS or buying a $99/year subscription is really not a big deal. If all you want is to fiddle around with it for a bit, then it doesn't really matter that you're not going to develop for it.

Don't get me wrong; I develop primarily for iOS and some Android, and don't even think about installing Windows, much less developing for it. But consider this:

If you want to develop for iOS, you need a Mac (which still sits at only 14% in US, less in the rest of the world; so chances are you need to buy at least a $600 machine), you need the developer subscription at $99, you need at least last year's operating system (Apple drops support for older versions rather quickly), and at least one device to test on. It also uses Objective-C, which you haven't used before unless you developed for Apple hardware.

If you want to develop for Android, everything looks free at first sight, but you'll also need a developer subscription and if you're serious about supporting your app, you'll need at least several different devices (this easily trumps the price of a Mac), because Android emulators are horrible.

There are more examples like this; recently Sony announced PSVita SDK, but for some inexplicable reason it uses Mono/C#, isn't compatible with Visual Studio, etc. It's even worse with traditional console SDKs.

The point is, although it's great to be able to choose the tools/platforms you use and have it all for free (web development anyone?), those companies want you tied into their ecosystem, and besides it's just not worth it going out of their way to please a minority of developers complaining about a number of random reasons.

You choose whether to develop for a platform or not of course, but if I were Microsoft and your main gripe was having to upgrade to Win8, I'd just not care.