Absolutely, I was intending to write up an article on it. It cuts down on the number of records flooding through the transaction table dramatically. Particularly if you have heavy purge activity going on.

People forget that insert, updates and deletes still flow through to the distributor even if they don't make it to the commands table.

Having separate distribution databases, even on a weedy virtual box, doesn't do any harm. If you run perfmon you can see the transactions per second going into the distributor. If you monitor it over time then you can get a fair idea when you should add a separate distributor and what should be hived off onto it.

That said we are seeing a massive boost from running SQL2008 64 bit on W2K8.