It works not bad, and I did it for some time. The biggest pain points are the lack of integration with the file system (I always forget how to set up shared folders) and that it can be hard to set up a decent ssh client. I use Cygwin ssh and mintty, and then ssh into the VM or external machines. Also there are the usual performance and space issues of VMs.

For this use case, "Ubuntu on Windows" seems to be a nice improvement.