I'm a Mac user, and I use Virtualbox to run Windows on my Mac laptop. (Virtualbox runs on Mac, Win, *ix)

After a recent laptop hardware failure I needed to run the VM on my desktop PC for a while, bought some extra RAM then realised that I was RAM-limited by the 32 bit OS on the desktop. So I installed Ubuntu 64 bit with Virtualbox in about half an hour. The Windows VM runs perfectly on there too.

What's not to love ? When everything you do is virtual, the base OS really ceases to matter.

That said, USB support is a bit primitive still in VirtualBox. Here's a post which may help.