Telnet is indeed an insecure protocol, but on your own PC isn't a big deal.
PuTTY is good, installing Cygwin (
http://www.cygwin.com/install.html) gives you regular SSH and a mostly functional BASH shell. It is the first thing I install when I am forced to use Windows, as it gives you POSIX platform and build chain (i.e. gcc, make, etc.), as well as a package manager with most of the "usual and customary" console tools and services most of us think of as routine (but which are still missing from Windows 7, go figure).
You cannot, however, do what you want without some additional efforts. You need to have Linux (Ubuntu or otherwise)
running someplace, not just installed. The easiest way (IMHO) to do this is to set it up in a virtual machine (VM). Microsoft makes something, but I use VirtualBox (
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) since it is free (as in $0 for personal use, F
LOSS version still available last time I checked, but now that Oracle bought Sun who bought VirtualBox, only time will tell if that lasts) very easy to set up and use. If you have a console-only VM you can ssh into it. You can even do things easier, since you can have the whole Linux VM run in a window, like any other application.
You can also do the reverse when you are booted into Ubuntu--install a Windows VM (I have an old WinXP VM I use on my home PC for a few applications that still won't run under WINE).
Personally, I use KDE 4.7/openSUSE 11.4 and run my VM in full-screen on my work-issued Win7 laptop so I don't even have look at Windows most of the time. I don't have any sort of experiences that would suggest that GNOME wouldn't be the same.
One other nice thing is that you can (with a little extra disk-space, of course) create multiple VMs one with Kubuntu, one with GNOME, one with Unity, one with Xfce, one with Sugar, one with...(you get the idea) and compare them side-by-side. You can also partition and format a thumb-drive with Ext and carry your VM around with you. Just be sure to encrypt /home in case you loose it. You cannot use FAT32, since you will likely have a virtual drive >2GB.