Yep Simon - that's all understood and spot-on. You probably should have clarified that you were referring to a custom, bespoke hardware environment earlier. In this regard the humble X86 architecture is of course more flexible for sure. Horses for courses!
For most users here, your particular scenario would never arise - we just use our machines on our desktops for "typical" application duties. Some specialist apps that we, here in amateur astronomy, might use also fall outside the "typical" desktop box. Again, due to the sheer numbers of Win-based machines out there it doesn't make business sense for many application developers to cater to MacOS as well... so Mac users, on occasion, miss out... well in native mode anyhow. Go virtualisation!
