My best friend Jeroen van den Bos has just posted a great article about why Visual Studio should be part of Windows. Jeroen and I share a long history together and as we're both ex-demosceners, I fully understand his reasoning and I wholeheartly agree with his point: make Visual Studio.NET Express part of Windows Vista.
I too started programming a long time ago, on a Toshiba HX-10 MSX-1 computer. And as Jeroen described, I too had the same experience: you start up the computer, within a few seconds you end up in the computer's interface which is actually the program editor as well. Typing in listings from a magazine, altering a few variables and whoa, the screen turned yellow instead of green, cool! 
The path towards getting things running on your computer was very short, though since then it became more and more difficult to get started into using the computer just for writing a simple application: in the early days, GWBasic was shipped with DOS, however today, it's less obvious to 'run into' program source as a novice computer user and to get offered that possibility to even alter a few things and see what it does. People have become more and more passive users instead of active users.
To stop losing the potential of next-year developers to linux, I agree with Jeroen: bundle the VS.NET Express editions with Vista (one or more). Make the user of the OS again an active user, and who knows, perhaps a whole new group of potential programmers is found. 