Well finally I'm back on to a normal sleep cycle again...

From what I've seen and dabbled in you do not have to "use" windows. You only need windows to start a windows program and manipulate the windows screen you open for the game and that's about it... but I think it is possible not to even use windows. Opengl is setup very much the same way windows is setup with it's window generating class hence we could very well make it only using OpenGL. You only want windows if you want to do things with the operating system which we would if all the mouse clicks and keyboard pushes weren't handled by OpenGL. On the other hand we do need UDP protocols and sadly... we need to work with windows for that one OR develop a special dual unix/windows class that will compile differently depending on the operating system. Doing this will be both tricky and buggy because you need to know C compile codes and other ancient tech.

As for window's syntax system I agree it looks a bit bizarre but you're only at odds with it because it's not the same as the C syntax. The way you were first exposed to something will always leave a bit of bias but in this case it isn't so underserved