Desktop app UIs were never this painful? WPF, WinForms, WTL, MFC... all could be pretty darn painful when you got beyond the basic Hello World examples.
Interestingly, MFC was painful at least partly because instead of MVC, it wanted to drive you toward a Document/View architecture, where Document had both Model and View. This was painful exactly because of some of the problems that MVC was designed to fix.
