Oh snap! I must've stroke a chord. What did I say? I mean, he asks how to grill a steak, but some suggest how to cook brats.
The thing that makes OS X so darn "stable" is that they write drivers for a very limited set of hardware - the reference implementation.
On the Linux reference implementation, everything works properly (See the ThinkPad T series).
On the Windows reference implementation, everything works properly (See the Surface).
Simply because something works when it's built for a piece of hardware (think embedded systems) doesn't mean that it will work when running on something that it wasn't designed for.
No one is advocating doing that. And no one gives a shit about how hard it was for the engineers.
You should buy a Macbook precisely because it is a reference implementation that works as a consumer product. Let OSX deal with laptop-y details like WiFi, screen brightness, battery/power management, suspend/resume, and device drivers. Let VirtualBox abstract away those details so FreeBSD behaves like it does on its reference implementation - server hardware.
OS X does add a lot of overhead and I would love to run NetBSD on a dedicated hypervisor. In particular I want to try with the free Hyper-V Server because it has such great hardware/driver support but HVS doesn't support wireless networking.
That said, you just cannot compare an OS running natively (is that a word?) with a VM.
which works great for me BTW
I argued that you can install Linux on the MacBook, which gives you the advantage of good hardware support and a non-Apple and open-source OS, on which you can in turn run FreeBSD using a VM. And since MacBooks support Intel's VT-x which Linux KVM uses, virtualization actually works very well with this setup.
Obviously, when possible, buying a laptop with good FreeBSD driver support is the superior choice.