Checking the install state for the product via MsiQueryProductState is pretty much equivalent to checking the registry directly, but you still need the GUID for the ProductCode.
As mentioned elsewhere, one drawback with these approaches is that each update has its own ProductCode!
Thankfully, MSI provides an UpgradeCode which identifies a 'family' of products. You can use orca to open up one of the MSIs to extract this information. For example, the UpgradeCode for VS2015's redistributable is {65E5BD06-6392-3027-8C26-853107D3CF1A}
You can use MsiEnumRelatedProducts to get all Product IDs for that UpgradeCode. In practice, since each redist update replaces the previous one, this will only yield one ProductCode - such as {B5FC62F5-A367-37A5-9FD2-A6E137C0096F} for VS2015 Update 2 x86.
Regardless, you can then check the version via MsiGetProductInfo(productCode, INSTALLPROPERTY_VERSIONSTRING, ...) or similar functions to compare with the version you want, eg to check for an equivalent or later version.
Note that within a C++ application, you can also use _VC_CRT_MAJOR_VERSION, _VC_CRT_MINOR_VERSION, _VC_CRT_BUILD_VERSION if you #include <crtversion.h> -- this way you can determine calculate the CRT version that your binary was built with.