I was new to the Mac until a couple of years ago when I purchased a Mini for a family room TV. I wanted to use XP also, so I installed it in a boot camp partition.
Since that time, OS X has been upgraded to Leopard, boot camp is out of beta, and Fusion has became a mature easy to use virtualization product for the average user. I installed Fusion using the boot camp partition for Windows, and found that I never needed to boot directly to Windows. Now that Netflix is Mac compatible I seldom even use WIndows on this machine.
When Windows 7 Beta, came out I wanted to try it on my mac, and I tried my first VM. It installed easily with no hiccups. In fact, it's the easiest OS installation I have ever made going back to the days of DR DOS. It worked so well that I made an XP VM from my bootcamp based VM. A comparison of XP operation with both VM's reveals no significant difference.
I am not a Mac or Fusion expert, but my advice would be to forget about boot camp, and make a XP VM. You can make a boot camp partition later if you feel it's necessary.
