Microsoft is now pushing Visual Studio as a full-featured tools platform, with benefits similar to those provided by Eclipse. Looking at the main landing page for Visual Studio 2008 you'll see a very prominent reference to the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 Shell:
Use Visual Studio 2008 Shell as the core foundation for your own software development tools.
Microsoft has always made Visual Studio extensible so 3rd parties can build add-ons and extensions to the IDE that can give developers capabilities that are missing from the the tool set included out of the box. But, it seems like the focus has been more on getting third parties to extend the functionality of Visual Studio than to provide a platform for tools development.
The Eclipse project has similar cababilities for extending existing tools based on Eclipse, but their focus is on providing a rich platform for all tools developers. As a result, the Eclipse platform is widely used for a wide array of non-Microsoft tools.
Cudos to Microsoft. Time will tell how this affects the tools landscape.
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