The point of the Windows Subsystem for Linux is that you don't need to run a VM. It is much more efficient in terms of speed (you're not keeping a whole virtualized Linux kernel and everything else running) but also in terms of energy. I can run bash on my Surface (not pro) 3 without any noticeable hit to battery life and without hurting performance.

If 'real linux' is the Linux userspace, then that's what you're getting with Ubuntu - all of 'Linux' except the Linux kernel. WSL allows the NT kernel to handle all of the Linux syscalls. If you consider just the public interface, then WSL is also 'real linux'.

Of course this is all theoretical because there are still some bugs here and there. Those are being dealt with and WSL is making great progress.

I used to do exactly what you're suggesting. I had a headless vm always running in my laptop and I used to ssh into it. I have turned the vm off since I started using bash on Ubuntu on windows. There are hiccups, but 99% of the time I don't notice that it isn't "real" Linux.

It's faster to not have to have a separate filesystem, and with the new update or cbwin [1] you can launch native Windows apps from the command line.

[1]: https://github.com/xilun/cbwin

I've had 0 need to do that as a web developer, and I much prefer developing on windows 10 than Ubuntu. The bash shell does everything I need it to. The small things that don't work in the bash shell, I can just run the windows version. It basically just boils down to the tools and environment you need, but I have everything I want and need on windows 10 now.