The original article is confusing.

Boot Camp is of course free, but only permits rebooting a Mac into Windows. For $70 one could purchase VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, and run Windows side by side with OS X. The author of the Washington Post piece does not make this clear.

Calling Boot Camp a "secret weapon" suggests that most people aren't aware that Apple computers can run Windows. This may be true in the wider world, although any Apple employee in a retail store could inform customers otherwise.

Expecting a writer not focused on technology to discuss gratis tools like VirtualBox and modern.ie is probably asking too much (although these would be well within the reach of Hacker News readers).

You'd imagine so. It wouldn't be legal though since modern.ie is for testing purposes only. Though I highly doubt anyone much would care if someone ran vitualbox and a copy of XP/Vista or something.

I suppose in a sense it becomes a bit of a worry if you run too lightweight on the VM which after all will have to contain your banking credentials (sort of the opposite of firing up a VM when you're doing something that feels too sketchy to run on the main system).

Many native "security" solutions required by websites, e.g. anti-keyloggers and antiviruses, would block the VM. They also tend to trigger weird problems in the VM, e.g. some of them makes the entire desktop fail to respond to any events. (What?)