Wow one of the founding principles behind what I want to get out of writing my OS is maybe already being done, and no less, implemented in hardware which is probably the best place for it:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994215

Neato; I just hope it makes it to market and doesn't suck.

If anything, it'll be a huge leap forwards in emu/virtualization, or backward if you keep in mind that many emus in the Amiga days booted straight from hardware w/o loading an OS, thus cutting out a huge amount of overhead that today's popularized emu's and virtualization apps due. One drawback was that you couldn't run say, a Mac emu while running the amiga native stuff; this sounds like it might get away from that. Very neat.