I actually do all three. I have a Parallels Partition and I dual boot to native Windows for my gaming. I love Fallout 3. And I use the same partition in VM to work on files while surfing safely in OSX. I also have a VMWare Fusion for my Suze and Ubuntu and Win 7 which are smaller 20GB virtual drives only. My Suze is just a play box, and my Ubuntu runs some of my remote torrent sites hosted in France. Win 7 is also just for play, before I finally ditch my Acer copy which is my main XP VM.
That's very interesting. I had never thought of doing all three. But I could start out with one. I don't do much gaming, so I don't think I need to run Windows natively. Or Linux for that matter. So I am leaning toward a virtual machine.
Since you have a lot of experience in this area, I would like to avail myself of your expertise. Have you found any advantages or disadvantages to Parallels versus VMWare?