I'll admit I haven't looked through all the postings, but one very important
part that was left out of these setup guides. Active Directory. When testing
or deploying SharePoint you really should be using Domain accounts. For
this, you really should have AD installed so that you can have domain
accounts to work with. With this in mind, you would then also be using
additional domain accounts to test  the various access permissions in your
SharePoint deployment by adding different domain users  to the different
SharePoint groups.

You don't have to have your AD on a separate virtual machine, although this
would be preferred if you want to be able to test all the functionality
properly. (Document conversion will not work if SharePoint is installed on a
DC for one thing.) In a virtual environment you can setup a DC/SQL server
and then have your SharePoint server as a second virtual machine.