I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway).

Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.