The question is: what type of mac mini. If you go for something with 64G + +16 cores, it's probably more than most laptop so you can run much bigger models without impacting your job laptop.

it's because Apple blocks access to iMessage and other Appe services from non Apple os.

If you, like me, don't care about any of that stuff you can use anything plus use SoTA models through APIs. Even raspberry pi works.

It absolutely can be a vm. Someone even got it running on a 2 dollar esp32. Its just making api calls

I don't know but I'm guessing that it's because it makes it easy to give access to it to Mac desktop apps? Not sure what's the VM story with Mac but usually cloud VM stuff is linux so it may be inconvenient for some users to hook it up to their apps/tools.