Running native will yield much better performance, and force you to learn faster, and not to walk away from problems and just use a windows tool.
That being said, except perhaps not being able to do things like watch movies or play games for performance reasons, you should be able to learn quite alot running a vmware install, so I would encourage you to keep playing with it until your comfort level rises a bit, and your ready to try it as your main os again
I actually have windows installed in vmware on my linux box just in case I need it to talk a windows- using friend how to do somthing over the phone, or to test a piece of windows only software
