I keep hearing this meme but I use node on Windows and don't have any issues with this. You have to have Visual Studio and Python installed, but most of us have that anyway.
Same, my problem was with a project that contained bcrypt in a node js project (fetched it from GitHub and NodeJS in Visual Studio didn't succeed at importing bcrypt for some reason).
I think it was the Ghost project (the blogging platform), that used bcrypt. (i hope you guys of NodeJS Tools read this, because it was the reason i didn't use it and used my Raspberry PI as an alternative :) )
What version of VS did you need? Some of the information on getting gyp working was like VS2008 SP1, plus the Win7.1 SDK.
If this is no longer true, I'll give it a whirl.