Sorry about the synergy thing, 20 years of my own experience in the business has left me jaded and cynical, especially when it comes to corporate politics. You know, the Dilbert effect.
Anyway I can understand the appeal of the Macbook Air, I'm sure when I get around to going over to our local Apple store I'm going to want to fondle one.
My story on moving over to the Mac side is that prior to his Steveness going back to Apple, Macs were indeed over priced, and their OS was getting cruftier by the year. I didn't consider going with the first Macs, cool as they were because of the whole cheap clone running DOS, then Windows thing. At the time I used the powerful Sun work stations running UNIX mostly, so that's what I considered a 'Real Computer', but could never afford to actually own one, much less a Mac of that era. So with the clones I went. Fast forward to '95, a time which I consider Windows to be an actually really innovative thing that could at least make my feel like I was using my own Windowed, multitasking work station. It was perfectly adequate, and I could afford the computer on which it ran.
Then I discovered Linux, actually by way of discovering FreeBSD. I needed to run X to run a database defrag GUI tool that worked on Windows, but crashed a lot with the win32 version. Found that the one that ran natively on the database server (which was a Dec Alpha running Dec UNIX) with the GUI displayed back to an X window on a remote machine running Linux was rock stable, and allowed me to actually do the thing we bought the tool for. This led me to rediscover the world I was in back when I was lusting over NeXT machines, which nobody could afford. Now I could really afford owning a Real Computer, as described in the third section of this post.
Macs still stayed off the radar even after Jobs rejoined Apple and basically started selling NeXT machines that were made way better. Hardware still too pricy. I knew that Mac OS X was a UNIX, but Steve hadn't finished cleaning house of the arrogance of pricing the hardware competitively with commodity hardware. It's still up there, but the gap isn't nearly as wide these days, which brings me to the one best decision that Apple made ever, IMO.
They introduced the Mac Mini.
And the timing was perfect. By then I had built a whole bunch of computers by purchasing/scavenging/recycling all of which ran some or other flavor of Linux, and I had settled into a nice routine of home-grown scripts that supported my little music recording hobby and other things. I had built my wife a machine which ran XP (she's a "layman", and for non-tech types I recommended at the time that they just run Windows XP on Intel.) My employer supplied me with a Windows XP laptop which I used for corporate apps, but for my own personal computer, it was Linux all the way. I was thinking about this the other day, and the last Microsoft OS that I ever purchased with my own money that didn't come with the machine was Windows '95 on 13 floppy disks no less. Anyhow I was getting tired of building my own machines and being 'systems support' both at the office and at home. So I thought I'd give this new Mac Mini a try to see if it could meet my needs. Keep in mind this wasn't an Intel, thus Windows didn't come anywhere near being an option for me back then. So I bought one but had the Linux box nearby in case I needed to chuck this thing over Ebay once I transferred all my data over to it.
It was an unqualified success.
I essentially had my lusted after NeXT machine, with about a decade of improvements that made it even better. All my bash scripts ported over. I could use Terminal for that Command Line experience.
My wife had a Mac Mini on her desk 6 months later. Experiment II.
It was an uqualified success.
Six months after that we got a nice little inheritance, and within one week of each other I had a Macbook (white) and my wife got a Macbook (black). Now we were mobile in addition to using the best notebook computer ever.
I shipped the Mac Mini to my parents, to convince them to come over to the light side. They haven't yet but their upgrade cycle is much slower than mine.
I have two gig in my Macbook, and Parallels takes up one of those, and didn't really impact my ability to do other things. I created a Parallels VM to run XP to run all the corporate apps when I needed to travel light and didn't want to carry two notebooks around but still needed to work while out and about. My wife spent a good number of weeks in a big city hospital, so I used it for that quite often since we live rather far from this city. I'd be out in the parking lot glommed onto someone's WiFi checking email and answering tickets. My wife glommed onto someone's WiFi from her hospital bed so we could iChat with each other. Video iChat even. She loves her Macbook, and when I say that I'm kind of jealous about it. Good thing I have my own. I have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse though, and a widescreen external monitor. Nyah!
Anyway, there you go. If you get an Air, I'm sure you're going to love it and it's going to be quite useful and pleasant for you. About the only thing that might impact performance would be the fact that it uses a rather pokey disk, but Mac OS X is very good with memory management, so you are probably going to be able to stay within that two gigs of RAM and not swap too much even with the VM running. Also VM's (at least Parallels does, I'm sure VMWare has a similar feature) are very easy to suspend, pretty much instantly and at will. When I used my VM I would not boot it for weeks, but boot it, do what I wanted with whatever Windows app I needed, then suspend it. When I needed it again I'd make a click or two and it would pick up right where it left off. Suspend it, and it's an 8 gig file on disk that takes up only that space and the RAM/CPU is free for other things. Just like the Macbook itself, which are the only notebooks I have used that I feel comfortable 'sleeping' and at that by just closing the lid, and I'll be confident that it'll wake up right where I left off wherever I might be.
Okay, let's see how much of a novel this is going to look like...preview button...wow. Got a lot to say. Good thing I type at something like 80WPM.