From my perspective, Chrome is magical in terms of resource usage. You get a task manager to kill off tabs that use ridiculous amounts of CPU for when you aren't even looking at them, and all it takes is a simple refresh to bring them back. Compared to Firefox on Ubuntu on my cheap modern laptop, I can run an immensely larger number of tabs in Chrome with less CPU load, and bring them up very quickly. It seems like it is definitely doing a lot more GPU caching, as I have encountered a lot of weird graphical effects clicking to tabs that I haven't been using, especially when restoring a large session (I've been using Chromium lately).
As far as the virtual machines go, you could potentially just remote for those, no? Honestly I would prefer a laptop running on a very low load, especially if it's in my lap!