I work as a consultant programmer, typically in large businesses. I use a Windows Laptop, and many of my colleagues use a Mac.

My personal preference would be to run Ubuntu if I could have complete control over my development environment. But I will have occasional need for Microsoft specific products, especially IE.

My colleagues that use a Mac often run Windows on a virtual machine for these situations.

My question is: Is Ubuntu a workable solution for the laptop of an enterprise programmer? For example, is it as easy to run Windows on a VM on Ubuntu as it is on a Mac? Has anyone out there tried this? Is there any particular reason why Ubuntu would not serve as well as a Mac for development in this environment?

Note that I am not doing .NET development, so I am typically dealing with Java that is going to be run on an Apache server and used by clients running Windows.