That statement is wrong and ignorant, pardon me for being frank... if you program on windows it's virtually a necessity to use an IDE and it's the most common and most supported one, so you are kind of stuck with it.
On Windows, I use QtCreator more often than I use Visual Studio.
And there's also Code::Blocks, Netbeans and Eclipse and Codelite and Sublime Text.
And there is MinGW/Cygwin for those people that for some reason want to use a different compiler than Microsoft's C/C++ compiler suite.
Emacs also runs great on Windows.
I have indeed used the console frequently, so - contrary to Linux zealot beliefs - Windows users do have a multitude of options.
He's saying it's the most common and most supported one (true as far as I know) and therefore is the "canonical" IDE on Windows, not that it's the only one. Being "stuck" with it is often true in a corporate environment where all the tools are built around VS. It's not that other tools don't exist or aren't good (I do quite like QtCreator), it's that VS is more common, just like MS Office is more common than OpenOffice or LibreOffice on Windows. Being "stuck with it" doesn't always apply, of course, but practically-speaking not everyone gets to choose what IDE they use at work.