qemu is a (soprt of) VM and reportedly works fine for running programs. (I have not really ever tried to run anything myself, scratchbox ARM compiles run under qemu so I have "used" it in that sense but not in the sense that I would personally figure out how to make qemu to do something specific)

VMWare et co are *para*virtualization systems, meaning they do not do full virtualization (==emulation) but "merely" control who and when the underlying HW can be accessed (this has huge performance benefits [or more specifically: avoids the huge performance penalties of full virtualization] along with important drawbacks; like not being possible to emulate different processor architehture)

Phones tend to have a lot more of esoteric hardware and buses than PCs and doing full virtualization of all of those is far from trivial (and a very fast moving target).

Also since mobile devices tend to be heavily resource constrained running the stack of host os, virtualization layer and full client os is really going to slow things down for both the host and client (probably to the point of both being unusable)

I looked at VMWare back in the days when it first came out (this is what, 10 years ago?) and while it was attractive concept the machines I ran it on (not top of the line but not low-end either) really did not have enough spare resources to do the job nicely. Then I let it be for many years, when even laptops started to come with dual-cores as standard the picture had changed dramatically; there's plenty of spare resources both cpu (especially since a lot of programs still don't do threading properly to take advantage those cores...) and RAM. Disks are faster too (though more important factor with the access speed to the disk image file on host OS is the spare RAM being used as disk cache).


So in conclusion: It's probably possible, also it's probable that the experience is very slow... (dual-boot gives you the "real" speed [disk access for loading os and programs is of course different since you can't boot the other OS from the fast internal flash])