if you must buy special hardware just to compile code, well... that's not normal for any other eco-system's developers. Nor is having to pay for the privilege of being a developer... nor pay for dev tools, etc.

You don't have to pay for dev tools (Xcode is free). You only have to pay if you want to distribute through the App Store or, for iOS, test on a device.

But I already own a mac, and it's fantastic hardware that I can do development for anything on, and the dev tools for OS X are free.

But you can't pay a fraction of a cent per hour to run your unit or integration tests for every commit unless you set up the infrastructure to do so yourself.

Though now that travis-ci has beta support for osx, this is changing. But probably at a much greater cost and complexity than it could have without the VM restriction on the license.