I would agree that VBA was the gateway to VB4/5/6, and that LOTS of programmers probably got their start in that fashion. However, I would say that what drove Windows to dominate the market was not VB, though VB was a contributor. After all, I decided on a computer before I got into programming. My decision was based on: What ran the programs I wanted to use...and that was about all. Windows had the best games, Windows had the best productivity software (pre-Office it was Lotus, which was big in my time, though I realize that was second generation, as well), and Windows had the most innovative hardware at the best price. Mac was great hardware at the time, but it was all controlled by Apple and there was little innovation with the hardware and it cost a lot more. All the innovation with video was happening in PCs, which also meant that all the innovation with games was happening in PCs (once Amiga died out).

Most businesses probably went to PCs because of IBM and the price. Most individuals probably went to PCs because they used them at work, and that's where all the games were (games drive a lot). Along came VB and made it easy to write programs, but VB wasn't the first in that, either. I started with macros in Quattro Pro (which was remarkably like ASM the way I was writing them). When we got Excel95, I re-wrote one of those macros in VBA. The macro in Quattro Pro took 6-8 hours to run, so you started it and went home...and hoped there wasn't a bug. When I re-wrote in VBA, I ran a subset as a test, which would have taken 20 minutes in Quattro Pro. It was finished in about one second, so I assumed I had messed it up. When I realized that it had run correctly, I saw how powerful VBA was. However, I wasn't hired to write macros, I was hired to collect and identify fish, so I was just a person who turned to programming to make a tedious aspect of my job go away. That 'business' (actually academic research) had no interest in programming until I showed what it could do, then they used that program long after I had left. They didn't buy a computer because of VB, they bought because of the software that ran on it, which was all written in C/C++. They did end up benefitting from VB, but it was an afterthought.

I don't know which path to Windows was more common, so if you want to believe that VB was what made Windows, I can't prove it either right or wrong. I will point out that there IS an alternative view that makes sense.