Neither! It's just clumsy to try to do any sort of development work running a virtualized Unix box inside a Unix box.

I'm curious about this suggestion - is this for python only or does anyone run the C/C++ development tools on the tablet?

lcuk does all his liqbase development (which is C) on the tablet. Just enable the SDK repository and apt-get install gcc.

I do run gcc, although I haven't done any substantial development.

I'm not sure if Jaffa has installed gcc more recently than I have, but my experiences about a month ago were not so simple -- had to downgrade a few packages because the SDK did not keep up with the SSUs, and all the -dev (headers) packages depend on the same exact version of the binaries.

Just be cautious if you do go that route, as you can install packages conflicting with dependencies of, oh, about half your system. (The critical half!) It'll ask you to confirm, of course, but don't blindly say yes; that's all.

I do generic ARM embedded systems development running a Debian-based environment (well, just some randomly selected Debian virtual appliance from the VMware store and a CodeSourcery toolchain installed in /usr/local) under VMware at work.

It's not too bad. I ssh to in from Terminal and have the home directory on OS X side available to Debian, i.e. all development files are outside the virtual machine. I use Xcode as an editor and project manager. X applications will probably work too if X is installed on OS X (installed by default on Leopard, separate free download in Tiger).

One small bug with this setup: Debian does not know when the machine has been sleeping, so I need to manually run "sudo ntpdate-debian" after resuming from sleep. Otherwise make is not happy.

I prefer running apt-get install build-essential

Indeed. I apologise: I was giving it as an example of what kind of thing to do, not a concrete HOWTO.