And: has anyone already built a 'haskell-in-a-box' virtual machine?
Some are working on an all-Haskell-boots-from-scratch OS: House (Haskell User's Operating System and Environment): http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~hallgren/House/
From the page: "House is a demo of software written in Haskell, running in a standalone environment. It is a system than can serve as a platform for exploring various ideas relating to low-level and system-level programming in a high-level functional language. More details are available in our ICFP 2005 paper: A Principled Approach to Operating System Construction in Haskell."
Also, YHC is (in development) a new Haskell compiler based on nhc98 that aims to produce highly portable bytecode which can then be ported to JVM, .NET, etc. and of course a C virtual machine: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/yhc/ Jared. -- http://www.updike.org/~jared/ reverse ")-:"