While virtualization is a solid way of accomplishing this, a dual boot on the same hard drive with many distros really isn't all that hairy either. I typically use Ubuntu for desktop linux boxes and it's installed is very simple when it sees Windows already on the hard drive. It defaults to setting up a dual boot with Windows. On my servers, it's either CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
However, if you are new to Linux and understand virtualization, this is a great way to learn and provides a quick and easy way to recover from accidents are you learn your way around. As you will find, Linux is a very different animal and takes some time to learn.
Linux Mint is just a rebundled version of Ubuntu with all of the multimedia features enabled by default. So, it provides the ease of Ubuntu with the ease of multimedia features working right off the bat. And the reason that Ubuntu doesn't work with all this multimedia by default is because they are codecs and such which are not freely distributed, and thus not included in the completely open source distribution. Also, if these items further restrict what you can do with the code, they are not included in the GPL.
