I guess the feedback actually did work
After all the brouhaha over Visual Studio 2012 not being able to build executables for Windows XP, it looks like Microsoft has reconsidered:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2012/06/15/10320645.aspx
Pity that we’ll have to wait for the update but at least those of us who still have clients that are exclusively XP can use a modern compiler…