My thoughts exactly. At work (as a sysadmin) I'm running a Windows desktop with 2 screens. On the second screen (which isn't really essential, but still nice) I have a VirtualBox Ubuntu installation fullscreened 24/7. So I basically have two systems side-by-side except:
- I have one mouse and one keyboard.
- I can see what's going on in both OS at the same time
- I only need to lock/unlock my console once
- I can seamlessly copy-paste between them.
- If I need to remote from home, I can just take normal RDP and the Ubuntu is available in a window too.
Even useless eye-candy in compiz works fine (though it's a bit slowish with RDP over interwebs). Both systems run all the time (well, the Windows needs to be booted occasionally where as KSplice deals with the Ubuntu pretty well), and they work just fine. From work-flow point of view it's mostly like working with a single system.
I also have a console switch so I can access a separate Mac (for OSX) from the same console. It works too, but it's such a pain to hop from one system to another that I usually try to avoid having to bother. What this "hot switching" sounds like is basically like using such a console switch. Doesn't sound so great when you're used to being able to just focus another window.