I mostly run VMs nowadays, with my older machines dedicated to one OS or another. That mostly works except when an OS needs certain kinds of direct hardware access (e.g., for gaming, or to do precise color calibration on a graphics card/monitor). I'd love to see virtualization-friendly hardware and advanced hypervisors that let you have fine-grained, secure passthrough of hardware to guests, and allow things like having Intel built-in graphics and a discrete GPU be allocated to different VMs with the ability to hotkey between them. The hypervisor front is making progress (Xen on a laptop would be cool), but the hardware side is mostly stagnant except in the server world.
I'm therefore also looking at setting up a big honking home server that I could then access VMs from remotely. The big drawback of course is that I would need decent low-latency Internet connectivity for that to work from anywhere, but at least I could use just about any client I wanted -- even old Toughbooks
