[_pdeschen]

Have you considered virtualization? Before adopting OSX, I went the virtualization route myself 4 years ago. I know it works on vmware (at least for me back then with vmw player running on Dell Linux laptop).

It probably depends on your requirements. YMMV

If you're going through this to save a few hundreds, get a mba refurbished.

[mmebane]

I have Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite running in VMWare Workstation. They work well enough to do web testing in Safari, but the video performance has been too slow to do much else, so I don't use them for anything too serious.