I bought a laptop from ELCOT for my sons. It came with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2. Kids wanted to see how it is like playing games in the "old" days. Nothing better than seeing and really playing! And so VirtualBox :-)
Also, having access to more than one OS without having to partition does not hurt -- even for a kid's laptop! We can run OLPC, OpenSolaris, Puppy Linux, or anything else!
starting Quake2 aka Jake in the browser would have been easier ;)
http://download.java.net/javadesktop/plugin2/jake2/
anyway good entry!