I do this a lot, particularly with projects that use a database that might be hard to configure (and the configuration isn't fully scripted). Just get the development version of the DB right once, and then make a copy of the machine in case you mess things up later and need to revert. It's saved me a lot of DB rebuilds, and I don't have to do DB migrations on both my laptop and desktop to keep them up-to-date so that I can run tests from either.
