You make a fair point about the performance hit of using a virtual machine. However, my Core2Duo 2GHz Macbook runs a virtual XP (with Visual Studio and SQL Server, don't forget) perfectly well, and is at least as fast as my 3GHz Pentium 4 HT PC running XP natively.

Virtual machines are great if you have one piece of software you need to run. If you're going to end up switching OSs then eventually you will want to install it "properly" into its own partition.

Of course, if you have a Mac with BootCamp and VMWare Fusion you can boot the XP partition either as a virtual machine (seamlessly, rather than trapped in a window) or as a proper OS instance from a boot menu. So you get the advantage of both.

I predict it won't be too long before we run large applications in their own virtual machines. Rather than installing all the Windows dev stuff into your PC you'll run a virtual machine. Same with games and office applications. A Core Quad processor isn't going to break a sweat doing this type of thing, and it seems technology is going towards multi-core rather than increased CPU speed now.

Oh yeah, you want to see network-based virtualisation too, that's impressive. Virtual servers can be moved from one computer to another - while still running.