* And for me the nice one is the integration with VS Code, I just select which distro I want to work in and VS Code will start it (if it isn't running), connect to it as a remote dev environment, and be able to control it as if the VM were within VS Code. It can be done manually with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox gives me no advantages in return.
* The networking implementation makes both 127.0.0.1 which is occasionally useful for me.
That's not a feature. And in practice it's not even relevant, because you can start your VM at Windows startup and use Putty to ssh into booted system which takes a fraction of second.
Also slim CentOS image boots, well, not in one second, but something like 5 seconds. Fast enough IMO.
Starting up VS Code on a machine with WSL2 immediately gives you the option to use it as the VS Code environment, it is pretty great.