I tinkered with this bastardized Ubuntu install this afternoon. It would work well for folks who are a ltitle too nervous to toy with VMWare, dual booting, or doing a full Linux install in general. It's literally a Windows installer that installs Ubuntu using a loopmounted ext3 filesystem on NTFS. No repartitioning, isos, or anything else to tinker with. Granted, its a 600MB download, but bandwidth is cheap :)

I had to tinker with my Grub config a bit on my Dell Latitude D610 (hd0,1), root=/dev/hda2, and manually edit c:\boot.ini, but that's it. Everything else is magic. (In case it's not magic, there's a forum thread to check out.)