Not really. Most of the core devs run it on bare metal. So far, I've tried it on my custom built PC, a Dell Inspiron and a Toshiba Satellite. Works perfectly.
What if host systems evolved to become little more than virtual machine managers, dealing with hardware drivers and so forth - while the user-space operating system is freed from having to worry about the actual hardware being used unless it really wants to?
I don't really care about the BeOS / Haiku kernel. We could use Linux for all the h/w support there is. BeOS was impressive but I guess Linux can be made to play a dozen videos at the same time, too. And I usually stick with only one.
But the user space and the user interface are brilliant!
I would trade Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, or $NAMEIT for the BeOS userland any day, both as an end-user (wrt. UI) and as a developer (user-space API). I hope we'll have more choice in the future.
How about this: install Debian, 'apt-get install kvm' (okay, you'll probably have to run that through module-assistant, but still, it's only a few more presses of 'Enter' away), then run 'qemu-system-x86_64 haiku.img -m 2048'. Voila! Linux as hardware abstraction layer and virtualization engine, with Haiku running on top.
