My setup which seems to work rather well for an Installation of SharePoint 2010 Foundation consists of the following

• MacBook Pro 2.53Ghz 4GB Unibody Running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
• Intel X25-M 160 GB G2 SSD
• VMWare 7 Workstation
• Virtual Image of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2 x64 2GB RAM allocated, 1 CPU, 2 Cores
• SharePoint 2010 Foundation Beta installed onto the Virtual in Standalone mode.

I was quite surprised how well this actually runs considering the system requirements for SharePoint 2010 but I have found it to be very snappy and it looks very good.

I think the trick here is the SSD without an SSD virtualization is pretty slow on a standard laptop but with an SSD it’s really quick well worth the upgrade costs. What's really impressive is if you switch between the Virtual and your base OS there’s no delay even if your installing software or something in the Virtual the main OS is still really responsive.

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