Counter-counter-recommended. This is needlessly duplicating immense amount of work that distro packagers do.
> You do not want to be tracking down a subtle version incompatibility when you're setting up a new server or deploying a new version to the production servers - or worse, when you rollback a change.
This is why LTS releases exist. If you're locked to Ubuntu 10.04, then you'll be using the packages that come with it until you're ready to make the significant leap to the next LTS version three years later.
> If you always use Debian-based systems, apt-get works great. But what if one of your devs wants to use a MacBook?
Then they can suck it up and learn how virtualbox works. Even versions you've hand-chosen are going to exhibit cross-platform differences that will make them fail to reflect the reality of production: case-insensitivity and GNU/BSD differences are two such things that come to mind. (Indeed, both of these have been encountered in the last few months by one of last few the VM-holdouts at work.)