Actually, with virutalization you can have best of both worlds. Just run a VMWare or Xen instance of Windows XP inside Linux and you can switch back and forth on the fly for that type of stuff. It works great for development.
The problem is paravirtualization still isnt supported in the x64 kernel. So its still too slow to do heavy tasks in. And you still need lots of ram and cores if you want to do lots of simultaneous work.