I wouldn't necessarily say Visual C++ is better than the other major compilers (I have a hatred of it's slowness on my Uni's 400MHz K6-2 machines with 128Mb, 5sec pauses with every 15-20secs of typing in it *sigh*), but most people code their Win32 C++ programs with it and use features that other compilers don't support.
I personally use MinGW at home for my simple Win32 commandline C++ programs, but for a certain simple GUI project at Uni it just couldn't compile the GUI portions. DJGPP with the Win32 extensions may do better, but it is far more complicated to setup than MinGW.