I have a recent Macbook Air 11 and two Thunderbolt Displays that I daisy chain. That lets me keep my telemetry terminals that monitor cluster health, chat and music off to one side while I work on the other display in a full screen iTerm2 session.

I keep a bluetooth keyboard and a magic trackpad at the desk. Docking is just a careful sequence of power.. wait a second.. thunderbolt cable. (That pause seems to ward off occasional hiccups in OSX recognizing the daisy chain.) Undocking is the same -- savagely yank out the thunderbolt cable, don't sleep first; most of my crashes came from introducing thunderbolt devices while OSX was sleeping.

EDIT:

Regarding Virtualbox -- it works quite well with Linux and one of the displays, although you probably don't want to use a bulky compositing window manager at a Thunderbolt Display's resolution. I use i3 with boring old urxvt's, so the lack of compositing oomph from Virtualbox doesn't bother me.