Magmai; No, you don''t have to use VCL if it''s not needed. The option just is "hidden" in console app wizard.
To bring some perspective to this, I use MSVC 6 at work and BCB4 at home.

MSVC''s editor is nice, I agree, but why does it take up the whole screen, as other apps visible from behind (as with borland''s system) is damn useful at times.
BCB has just about all the functionality of MSVC and more, but some things could have been done better - BCB''s project manager, for example, doesn''t allow subgrouping project files. (if you don''t see problems with this, you haven''t been involved in large - even 20kloc - projects...)
So, on editing side MSVC wins. However, the debugger... Give me borland any day. Yes, MSVC seems to have nice features, compile&continue et al, but lack of most basic functionality - stopping on (uncaught) exceptions instead of simply proceeding for example - has caused me to -- write better code (well, if the options are doing it right on the first time by using 15 more minuts or spending a few hours in the debugger (tracing a bug that I could have found in minutes with BCB...), I prefer the first option...)

(disclaimer; I probably haven''t used/found even half the options of either of those IDEs, so my opinions may yet change - I for example didn''t even notice that BCB had a project manager before I had used MSVC for a few weeks and started to miss it...)