A few months ago I made the plunge and bought a MBP. I've been slowly converting over my apps and configurations from my PC to my Mac (learning as I go) and couldn't be happier.
I'm so pleased with it that I've been preaching to family members to get one for their next computer upgrade. I even bought a new iMac this weekend for the new family computer at home (waited until Leopard was released).
I decided to upgrade my MBP to Leopard (knowing full well that CF8 is not yet fully supported (I still have my PC laptop here as well and all of my projects are in SVN, so its not a big deal to use that until a CF8 patch is out or I decide to use a workaround (see comments on that page)).
I have several programs that don't quite work correctly (but I researched them before upgrading, so I'm not surprised and can live with them as-is until they are updated).
My overall impression so far is that I'm very pleased:
To answer your immediate questions: Yes, I am using Eclipse (with CFEclipse). I have both VMWare Fusion and Parallels and at the moment prefer VMWare Fusion. Using Boot Camp allows me to use either program to mount the partition in OS X (however, I seem to be getting smoother results if I don't use Boot Camp and just create an OS image).
I have a licensed copies of Vista, XP, and Win2k3. Any of those will run in VMWare and will also run MSSQL 2005 (although in my experiences so far Vista seems to be a resource hog just idling). VMWare Fusion also supports those in 32bit and 64bit on your Mac (assuming you have a Mac intel 64bit... if you're about to buy one, then yes it will be 64bit). If you plan to play video games at all, I suggest XP. For me I'm running Win2k3 64bit and it runs very smooth (no lag accessing the DB). I have 4GBRam on my MBP (bought the ram from Mushkin (note: its much cheaper to buy RAM elsewhere and does not Appel told me its the one hardware piece I'm allowed to upgrade without voiding warrantee)) and dedicate 1GB to the Win2k3 image (probably overkill for my needs).
I am using MBP with VMware too. I managed to install CF 8 with built in-webserver. I tried with Apache as well. It installed but i never managed to get it running. I was wondering what setup you used?
Kind regards
Tunç
I just switched over myself. As a freelancer, many of my resources are now "in the clouds", and platform independent, so I decided to go with the higher quality hardware.
Like you, I'm loving the switch and have become a Mac evangelist. From the little things like a magnetic powercord to the backlit keyboard, to the big things like durability and design, Mac is clearly superior (IMHO).