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Virtualization is pretty common, and getting more so every day. People are starting to look at their space lease and electric bills.

Virtualization is common. Developing applications where were you need to run that many VMs with that kind of load so that they need dedicated cores, is not. I really have no idea where this comment came from; no one was implying that virtualization isn't common. As I already said I use VMWare for development. I find the exact scenario you're describing to be out of the ordinary. I certainly don't think it's sufficient to describe the 8 cores as the Second Coming to software development.

You're right, the current Mac Pro incarnation is cheaper. I suppose my perception of the hardware being expensive is tainted by how it was even just a couple of years ago.

Virtualization is common. Developing applications where were you need to run that many VMs with that kind of load so that they need dedicated cores, is not.

What can I say? What I want to do involves clusters, and it's not a web app. How do you propose to handle four servers running at heavy load (pushing lots of data and probably hogging the processor), plus the other three servers and client, plus host OS, on four cores?

It could technically work, and probably work somewhat acceptably on extremely small test datasets, maybe a few tens of megabytes. That would get me through early development. But I need to test and optimize this for realistic datasets, like hundreds of gigabytes. I don't want to wait all day.