Oh its a lot more straightforward. For starters, you only need three things: a decent text editor, the MOAI host executable, and the MOAI SDK docs. All of these things can be found on Windows, Mac, Linux ..
Second of all, the MOAI API and programming environment is a lot, lot nicer than Objective-C/XCode/Frameworks.
But I say this, of course, with 4 years of experience in Mobile development, and 2 years with MOAI specifically. Of course I'm overlooking the training period I've been through - for a newcomer it may indeed look like a lot of hassle. But I swear, once you have spent a couple days building an app in Linux with MOAI, and then simply deploy it straight to Windows/OSX/Android/iOS targets, the value is obvious. I simply won't go back to XCode/Android/&etc. now - its just too fun to be building apps this way. One set of code, develop on your platform of choice, deploy all the way to the walled garden, and back again, around about the massive fields of Linux/Windows/OSX, and so on.
Second of all, the MOAI API and programming environment is a lot, lot nicer than Objective-C/XCode/Frameworks.
But I say this, of course, with 4 years of experience in Mobile development, and 2 years with MOAI specifically. Of course I'm overlooking the training period I've been through - for a newcomer it may indeed look like a lot of hassle. But I swear, once you have spent a couple days building an app in Linux with MOAI, and then simply deploy it straight to Windows/OSX/Android/iOS targets, the value is obvious. I simply won't go back to XCode/Android/&etc. now - its just too fun to be building apps this way. One set of code, develop on your platform of choice, deploy all the way to the walled garden, and back again, around about the massive fields of Linux/Windows/OSX, and so on.