I've found it best to do all the iPhone specific development on the MAC. MonoDevelop isn't as comprehensive as VS, but it's very useable. Xamarin have done a sound job on this and MonoTouch. The down side is OSX with all its irritating 'bouncy puppy', in-your-face skueomorphisms. I've found it best to avoid Xcode as much as possible. Xcode is probably the worst development environment I've ever come across, with a totally demented application model. Luckily you can do 99.9% of your app development without explicitly using Xcode as MonoTouch does the dirty work for you.

Great idea. I'm currently linking a Java project into .Net, and I think we need more badly documented, slow running stuff with ugly interfaces in the .Net world.

Just go with the flow, accept most human endevours are flawed and avoid fundementalism.