I’m pretty sure Mac has had emulation before Intel. It just runs better on Intel.
Yes on the first half, and a very silly statement in the second hals.
What they had before the Intel Macs was software emulation. Now they have "virtualization" (in the form of VMware Fusion, Parallels, and others).
Now shock me and admit you don't know the difference between "emulation" and "virtualization".
Quite right, they did. But it sucked so badly, nobody used it who didn't absolutely have to.
On Intel, they don't have to emulate. They just virtualize. Which means the CPU basically emulates itself (just bes itself in unprivileged mode) until it runs into a critical point (a system call), at which point the virtualization program intervenes and emulates the system call. The basic virtualization concept dates to the sixties and has benefited from hardware improvements to become just another app today. Decent virtualization apps (VMWare, Parallels) run well enough that performance is no longer an issue (but buy plenty of RAM — 4G is $100 from Crucial).
You can have Windows and Linux virtual machines, each with their own virtual hard drives and IP addresses, running as ordinary apps on your Mac. You do your work on OS X, move the results onto the virtual machines, test in the virtual machines, fix, re-test, etc. To switch to each VM's desktop, you configure one of your extra mouse buttons to invoke the Mac's Spaces app.