WinUAE's JIT emulator and RTG driver make it blazing fast, pretty much as fast as the host system. It's by far the most cost-effective way to run an Amiga system these days, but, as you point out, at the expense of not having real hardware to tinker with. You can run anything that you'd run on a regular Amiga, plus a few more things built with the JIT in mind that are just too slow to run on a real 68K chip, even though they're 68K binaries.
It's free (provide your own ROM and OS) /
cheap (ROM and OS preconfigured) to try out, so I recommend giving it a shot. I like it for when I'm on the road with a laptop and want to do some Amiga work/fun.
The biggest caveat is that you can't use real Amiga floppies. Most disks are easily converted into ADF image files, but stuff with on-disk copy protection will be difficult/impossible to convert, so you'll need to find a cracked version online (no legal issues here, since you already own the original). There is some Catweasel support, but my understanding is that it works just like a Catweasel in a real Amiga - it needs a DOSDriver and isn't bootable.
For the host system, pretty much anything running XP or newer will do. There's E-UAE for non-Windows systems, but WinUAE is far superior in terms of ease of use and performance.
