VS has amazingly good debugging tools. Other coding features seem to be prettymuch standard, like showing you arguments for a function you're calling and good autocomplete and refactoring and jumping around to declarations. It's got all the typical bells and whistles - all manner of GUI designers, Source-control integration, test-integration, code-review/commenting, etc, although they're very mature. I mean, it's obscenely featureful and the features are generally sensibly designed, so the sum is more than its parts there. The one place I really feel it actually shines is debugging.
That source control integration is definitely not 'mature'. It's terrible. Forgetting that TFS is just awful to begin, the integration in VS is lacklustre and based around very poorly thought out identi-lists and identi-tables that it's hard to extract any information out of. Simple things like getting a list of changed files in a build is several clicks and barely readable when you do find it. You get lost on what screen you're in cause they all look exactly the same. You're never sure exactly what you're committing and it also likes to throw some obscure warning which 90% of the time means nothing, 10% of the time is a repo or commit killer.
Even something as basic as Tortoise SVN is a massive workflow improvement over trying to use TFS.
And test integration got vaguely good in this VS maybe? I wouldn't call it good or mature. Maybe it was 2012, they happened so fast I barely used 2012. I remember trying to use it in 2010 and clicking on failed tests wouldn't take you to the failing line or the failing test, it would do bizarre things like expand an info pane that didn't actually have the info you needed. It was such a complete failure that they totally ditched it in VS 2013 and had a whole new UI.
And don't get me started on the god awful profiler they've added, what a disaster.
Half the things they add in VS suck, but are better than nothing.
IntelliSense is the best C++ code completion/"jump to definition"/"find all callers" feature available on any platform. The Visual Studio debugger is the best C++ debugger I've used. That's pretty much it, but it's enough.
Code completion and jump to definition isn't unique to VS. Pretty much any modern IDE offers it. GDB is an extremely powerful debugging tool that has a feature set that is really hard to match. It just has an extremely step learning curve. I can't really see much of an advantage of this besides getting to use tools you already know, which no doubt is a huge advantage.
No other code completion tool for C++ comes close to what VS offers, especially in speed. GDB is "powerful" but its UI is no comparison to VS, and when I say that I don't mean "GUI is better than CLI", I mean GDB's UI sucks. And UI does matter.
Code completion and jump to definition isn't unique to VS
of course not. But that is not the point, instead the point is those tools in VS are better than anything else out there. Having used a bunch of them I tend to agree. Definitely usability-wise the debugging experience just beats everything else.
I tried many IDEs, I developed at lest one project in most of the common languages and I still have to find one IDE that get anywhere near VS. It is solid, with good extensions, tons of features but yet it's not scary and quite ugly like most of other IDEs. The only downside is that when you have 6 or more solutions open my computer starts to slow down.
At least one clear advantage is that Eclipse is horribly slow in debugging when compared to VS. I don't know how does IntelliJ compare to it because I haven't used that.
Eclipse (at least for Android, I don't know how the platform-specific plugins affect this) is painfully slow period. My workstation is not new, but it is a decent quad core and it does have 8GB of RAM... yet even with nothing but openbox, a browser, and a text editor to contend with, it still manages to bog and lag consistently.
Obviously, there is the case where the code shop may have other project assets tied into the VS ecology-dev system but is that the only case?