Man, things just take so long! We had to wait one whole day after Apple released Boot Camp’s free dual-boot system before they finally came out with a virtualization solution that runs both operating systems side-by-side! Why does it take them forever to get these things out?

A company called Parallels is actually offering a beta version of this software for free–so if you have an Intel Mac and a copy of any version of Windows, MS-DOS, Linux, OS/2, or whatever, then get to their site, download the beta, and run multiple simultaneous OS’s now–so they tell us.

One can only presume that they released this now because of Apple’s move–they want people to go to their solution before they get too comfortable with Boot Camp.

According to the site, the software is easy to install, provides near-native performance, and can take full advantage of dual-core chips. No news yet on whether it provides full hardware support, or has any problems with video or audio drivers. Already some people are reporting that they’ve downloaded and installed it, and have gotten very fast performance with it (follow that link to see a flash movie showing XP on a Mac using Parallels); given that the news is just a few hours old as of this writing, it will naturally take a bit more time before full reports can come in. I myself am wondering if you can do full-screen switches, whether the Mac’s zoom feature will work in Windows mode (the Windows zoom sucks), and whether it will survive resolution switches reasonably well.

Nevertheless, this is pretty damn neat stuff, and may get me to start looking at buying an iMac sooner than I thought….