I think to get a good experience with Unity you have to try it on dedicated hardware. I initially tried it on VirtualBox (I don't know how well 3D is supported in VMWare, but GPU support isn't great on VirtualBox for me) and it was a terrible experience. But installing it on a separate partition, the experience was much more fluid, and enjoyable. There are some frustrating aspects, but overall, I think it's an innovative project. They have definitely done some things that Windows or OS X could imitate (and are imitating).