Well, there are developers and there are programmers.
Most of my clients couldn't care less that I made one line of code prettier than another. They want it to work, be supportable, with as quick a time to market as possible. That being said, I wrote several MFC C++ apps, and they don't hold a candle to the rapidity with which I can throw a .net c#/
vb.net app together. I recently wrote a web service that talks to handheld pc's for data collection in an hour! That's the whole SOAP communication layer for the project. That's pretty good. Now I know, will my c# compile into the most efficient clr (common runtime language) over something hand-written in c++? Probably not. Cost wise, time to market-wise, .net CLR is awesome.