Genymotion is miles and miles ahead of HAXM. Real Devices are best, though. But using real devices is much easier on OS X, due to not having to even think about drivers. I had to use Windows at a big corporate gig for a while, and that was one of the absolute worst parts of it: drivers.

"There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far."

It's pretty pervasive. Just about any major library is in git. Most projects are using git, too.