Yeah, I'm sitting with a Windows partition I still have to keep around just to sync my phone.
And I don't just sync music, I sync EVERYTHING (Outlook for my appointments and contacts, TV shows, movies, the whole 9 yards).
I use Evolution which talkes to OWA so I don't have to even use Outlook, but since iPhone is so married to Windows I have to keep it around. It's the only thing I have left that if I get rid of, I can jettison Windows for good (short of using seamlessRDP to run Visual Studio, but that's how I earn $$$).
With VMware, I use SeamlessRDP so I have my XP start bar on the top of my screen and KDE start bar on bottom of the screen. Can run Linux apps and XP apps simultaneously. Most of the time cut & paste works between apps as well. Just gotta get that f___in' iTunes to work!
VMware Fusion supports iPhone (look at their new release notes), and OSX is BSD-based! Something must be up with Linux not being able to talk to multichannel USB devices. Could the problem actually be in the kernel and VMware doesn't have a way to get around it without going through Purgatory (re: kernel developers)?