Microsoft has lots of great command line tools, I used MASM(Microsoft Macro Assembler) and the compiler and linker when I was learning (long long ago).

Nothing is more flexible that command line tools as it lets you do scripting(programming your own environment).

It does not matter if you want to use "already made by someone else windows, text, menus and buttons", but it is essential when you make (or manage what other people's make) everything.

My point wasn't that OS development is impossible in VS. However, given how much the OP seems to know about the subject, and the fact that virtually all resources about it presume that one is using a Linuxesque environment, I wouldn't recommend VS.

the last I heard (3-4 years ago), the OS/kernel team used emacs. the kernel group has its own build infrastructure that is partially / mostly exported in the DDK.

Untrue! I know "kernel people" who use Vim, too! :-)

However, my impression is most of them edit code in MSVC, build with the DDK tools, and debug with windbg/ntsd/kd like most other driver developers.