That story is quite hard to believe if I'm honest.
I'm guessing a Windows phone developer would own a windows pc and not a Mac as you say he is known to "rant about apple". Since you need a Mac to develop/publish for iOS would he really buy an iPhone, learn obj-c and buy a Mac just because the store he visited didn't stock Windows phones?
The bit I found hard to believe wasn't that he ended up an iPhone, it was that the store was essentially refusing to sell windows phones.
Anyway just dual boot you're desktop its really straight forward these days.
I recently rekitted my workstation to a i5. To install lion was literally as easy as boot off a USB drive, insert the install lion USB drive, let it do its thing, grab the associated drivers and put them onto your desktop, run the MultiBeast tool. Bingo running OSX.
I'm guessing a Windows phone developer would own a windows pc and not a Mac as you say he is known to "rant about apple". Since you need a Mac to develop/publish for iOS would he really buy an iPhone, learn obj-c and buy a Mac just because the store he visited didn't stock Windows phones?