I have a MacBook Pro and I've run VMware Fusion's unity mode and Parallels' cohesion mode along side the Mac OS X, and both work pretty seamlessly. I figured XP Mode in Windows 7 would be something similar, but I then learned my machine requires hardware virtualization support, which it does not have.

My machine is an HP dc7800. That's a dual core 2.2GHz machine with 4GBs of RAM. Certainly it has the horsepower to run a virtual environment alongside the primary OS.

I'm wondering:

1) Why Microsoft decided to make hardware virtualization a requirement

and

2) What am I missing? Is the experience similar to Parallel's cohesion mode / Fusion's unity mode?

Thanks!