Migrating from Intel to M2 Mac Air / Pro / Studio

since you are already running Big Sur, you are on the 64-bit side of that Grand Canyon, no 32-bit apps to carry along.

VirtualBox version 7 is available now, but may be a little rough around the edges. You can try it on your current machine, but you may need to uninstall version 6 to install version 7.

Photoshop will run under Rosetta emulation and a native version is coming if it is not already available.

none of the other items you mentioned have known issues.

Apple-Silicon M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max, M1 Ultra and now M2:

Apple says every well-behaved ordinary Application, originally written for Intel processors (that does not use Virtualization) will run on Apple-Silicon. It will use Rosetta emulation to translate the Intel binary to M1-binary.

Your Intel Apps will run and not crash while being executed on a completely different processor than the one the developer used. This is a truly remarkable feature.

It runs, and you can get your work done, which is what Apple promised and delivered.

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Most cross platform development systems, such as Android simulators, DO use Virtualization instructions, and are not currently working on Apple-Silicon M1 or M2 processors.

if the developer is serious about the Apple market, they will already be working on an Apple-Silicon OPTIMIZED version of their App. This version will ultimately contain code for BOTH Intel and Apple-Silicon, packaged up together as a "Universal Binary" and the correct modules for your processor are selected at run-time.

Virtualization software all has to be re-engineered, non-trivial Product Development.

You did not say you were running Parallels. There is a new version of Parallels available, and they are moving much more aggressively on the Apple-silicon Macs than VirtualBox.

There is a Parallels arrangement with microsoft that allows running the ARM version of Windows on Apple-silicon Macs. But Parallels in not free, and the learning curve is not free either.

<< Seems though that the overhead in moving to a mac pro or studio... >>

what overhead?

if you are worried about VirtualBox, install version 7 now and see if it will work for you.

Everything else you mentioned just works.

in my opinion, you are deeply mistaken.

Moving from Mac (intel) to Mac (Apple-Silicon) is completely straightforward. If you have time machine backups, Migrating your files is like a full un-backup.

You don't need new or alternate version of almost all of your software. Rosetta is near-transparent.

Users generally do not interact with the processor type. Apple has made similar transitions to different processors before, and they know how to make it really easy. Almost all your software will just run. If it is Intel-based, Rosetta emulation will be invoked automatically, and it just works.

Regarding VirtualBox: I was suggesting you test VirtualBox version 7 on your current machine, to see if its feature set meets your current needs. The developer already states it works on Apple-Silicon hosts, providing an x86 virtual machine "guest" environment, and is up to version 7.0.8.

it depends completely on where (what version MacOS) you are stating from, and what Apps you are running daily.

Please tell readers what model-year MacBook Pro and what major Apps you use.