OK — food fir thought and research.
I haven’t seen Apple emulating Wintel substituting for Wintel iron in the Fortune 50 companies I have worked with over the last decade (hell, some of the apps I work with don’t even play well with Citrix or VMs) but I will do follow-up due diligence.
It isn’t emulation — Macs run on the same Intel processors as Wintel boxes, and run Windows natively with the right drivers (which Apple and VMWare provide). There is a performance hit in using a virtual machine, but that’s because you’re running two operating systems at the same time.
One option not a lot of people have mentioned is Boot Camp, Apple’s software that allows you to partition the hard drive, install Windows, and boot straight into it. VMWare Fusion can use the Boot Camp partition to run a virtual machine, so you can use the same Windows installation both ways — side by side with Mac if you need the convenience, or Windows alone if you need the performance.
I work for an IT contractor, and the advantage of virtual machines for me is that I can have Win7 joined to one client’s active directory, and Win8.1 joined to another client’s, and switch between them seamlessly. I even have a WinXP machine, but I might archive it because I haven’t needed it for a while.
The great thing about virtual machines for a developer is that you can quickly switch between VMs for testing.