Seconded.
I was in the same position some 6 months ago, eventually buying a Samsung EX1 (AKA TL500 in the States, I am told). Oh, boy, what a problem - now I can't find any excuse to buy myself a DSLR or a MFT camera... And yes, I know of the deficiencies of this particular camera, but they do not matter to me at this stage. I carry the camera all the time with me, ready to shoot any moment I see something remotely interesting.
I routinely run 7-8 VBox guests with decent performance on a very modest dual socket dual core 8GB Opteron box - but under some version of Solaris, at this moment OpenIndiana 151a. I keep VirtualBox updated to the latest version (I'll put 4.1.4 tomorrow, though). I use it for network testing - Solaris, CrossBow and VirtualBox make for a very decent lab environment, not to mention ZFS snapshots and DTrace. The guests include three W2K8R2 DCs, some OpenBSD firewalls, mix of NetBSD VMs, two used to build -current and pkgsrc all the time, some W7 as well. Memory may be tight at times, but still it manages.
I've never ran VirtualBox hosted by Linux and do not intend to even try it (actually, I don't have a physical machine under Linux at this time). I do run a few Linux guests here and there, on my laptop while it is under W7-64 for example - Bodhi is quite nice. They usually cause the most problems - getting the right kernel source, development environment, headers and the rest.
I run NetBSD-Current (amd64) on my T61p; basically everything works as expected (including the graphics, i.e. non-accelerated). That is not a problem for me, as I triple-boot it (the others are W7/64 and, of course, OpenSolaris build 134).
Actually the latter runs best. NVidia acceleration out from the CD, all the keys work, suspend-resume without any problem, Java, AcroRead, even RealPlayer if you wish... W7 is as good as one can expect, but took some time to get all the drivers and the rest; NetBSD lacks the 3D NVidia stuff. I stay mostly under W7 (the VPN client I have to use is only Windows, although I have a spare VirtualBox m/c under OpenSolaris for that), use Crossbow/VirtualBox for network simulations under OpenSolaris, mostly pkgsrc under NetBSD (plus tracking -current).
It is the best laptop I've ever had, though. I wouldn't replace it even if it is almost three years old (especially with the maxed-out memory and a decent black scorpio disk).
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time. -- George Carlin