For several years, I've done all my local development with the help of Acquia's Dev Desktop. It's a specialized *AMP (MAMP, for me!) suite for Drupal that'll let you launch new projects rapidly. It's free to use and doesn't need any specific integration with Acquia. If you're working on your own independent Drupal project, it can still be a great solution. I was recently roped into testing a virtual machine for Drupal via the Drupal VM project.