[sk5t]

Not to nitpick, but VS Ultimate should be unnecessary for the 99% of developers who do not need an all-singing, all-dancing IDE, particularly around the integration testing stuff, and also the bundled TFS license. I suspect the pricing for Ultimate also bears some relationship to the price of Mercury/HP LoadRunner.

Windows Enterprise is not needed for compute clusters; AFAIK Microsoft doesn't actively sell any OS products at all for building a compute cluster (only for failover), rather expecting you to do something at the application level.

Anyhow, I'm not arguing that Windows is a fit for folks who need to spin up more instances on demand without a nearly linear increase in OS license costs, but Windows Enterprise and VS Ultimate are pretty unrelated to the concerns of heavy computing.