Thanks. I already own a copy of Snow Leopard Server.
And your hardware shouldn't matter. The animations are timed to take a certain amount of time. They don't run faster on faster machinery. I expect that you're in software development as well and if so, this is common knowledge, right?
Plus, I don't think your machine is 10x faster than mine. Faster, probably, but 10x? A hyperthreaded 2.3 GHz 4 core i7 (8 virtual cores) with 16 GB of RAM running of an SSD with a 6 Gb bus should handle basic animations without raising a blip on one core or the GPU.
The important thing about the visual fluff and functionality changes is that they are vast diversions from what people are used to and serious dumbing down of the operating system. And there is little to no way to turn these changes off and if you can turn things off, it takes a lot of time to discover how to do it.
The message is, don't change things so much that you piss your install base off and make their jobs harder by focusing on the wrong things.
Take a look at the new iTunes for example. Using Arial on a Mac as the default font destroys the look of the text output everywhere it is used. Buttons in the window bar no longer look like buttons, they just look like graphics. Much of the visual context that people are used to is just gone and when comparing the visual quality of the GUI to the previous version, the new version simply looks terrible and amateurish.
In any case, I'm out of the industry within two years and until then, I can deal with the VM solution rather well. Fusion was certainly a worthwhile purchase.