> I have no need for "total control" over the emulation.

A lot of people are saying this, and I guess I just have a mental block. Full-blown emulation was the only game in town for 20 years. Plus there was the 6 years I ran lots and lots of KVM's. I suppose I'm just used to it.

Of course if you are so used to it you may not see the benefits, it's like those people who have crafted their vim/emacs environments and do not appreciate IDE advancements.

But if you think about the occasional user, the new user, the one who does not have such an experience it's like sky vs earth.

In VMs you have to think about a lot of things. Mounting external filesystems, bridging the network, starting and stopping the machine, GPU integration, copy/paste, guest additions, headless vs screen (what screen? do you need a VNC instance?) and so on. It's overwhelming and even dangerous (did you do "rm -rf /directory" withour remembering you mounted your whole host filesystem there? oh my..)

All this stuff is greatly simplified with a lot of Microsoft engineering time that went behind it. Linux processes are very integrated with Windows ones, you install everything with one command, it "just works", and, being target at programmers, all the developing tools stuff work seamlessly.

So yes, for a lot of users it's a huge deal

All of our solution architects on Windows Systems that require Unix Utilities run WSL - none of them even considered running virtualbox/vmware. I can think of a couple reasons. The first is that there is zero learning curve to installing Ubuntu - they have a hundred things they need to learn, and futzing with virtual machines/installing linux is one less thing they have to deal with. The second is seamless integration between their windows applications and linux file system.