I haven't done it with VirtualBox, but I have with VMWare - it is monstrously slow, until you install VMSVGA2[1], then it's pretty gravy. It's not as quick as native but it's massively improved.
Some applications render better than others; I see a nearly order-of-magnitude better framerate in Safari vs Chrome, which is too bad, but all in all it's usable and I do some development in it with few issues.