Visual Studio can develop for iOS now (yes, you read that right), and Swift is a more pleasant alternative to Objective C.
This is probably more of a, "I'd rather use Visual Studio with my Swift project" instead of "I'd rather use Swift with my Visual Studio project." It's a very nice IDE, and Xcode is not quite as nice.
I don't know if this is included in your "Xcode is not quite as nice statement", but I have personally never had VStidio crash on me. Whenever I use Xcode, it seems like every third day or so something disasterous happens.
there is still a lot of pain in using visual studio for iOS.
its obviously the way forward though... i'd still not use swift for it predominantly if i can use a tiny layer of obj-c/swift to interface to sensible code written in C++ that works for every other platform too.
