Since my SharePoint 2010 technical preview installation under VMware isn't exactly the fastest thing i decided to go on and install the beta directly onto the Windows 7 64bit running on my Thinkpad T61.
Not needing to run a virtual pc saves a lot of overhead, and since my laptop only has 4GB of ram this helps a lot.

Installing SharePoint 2010 is easy, but compared to a normal, supported, installation a few extra steps are required:

• Extract the Sharepoint image
• Download and install the prerequisites manually
• Add a setting to config.xml in order to allow installation on a client os
• Manually activate the required windows features
• Install the FIX FOR: WCF: Sharepoint Shared Services Roll-up update

If you skip installing the WCF fix the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard will throw an "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport' error

You can now install SharePoint 2010 on your Windows 7 (or Vista SP1) based workstation. According to Microsoft a standalone installation is the only option, but a quick search on Google will reveil that this is not entirely true, and since installing on a client os isn't supported anyway...

References:

• MSDN Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server
• MSDN Blog Installation notice for the SharePoint Server Public Beta on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows 7