I’ve been doing some investigation on what it would take to move my main work environment back to Linux (Ubuntu specifically).

Even though these days it's possible to run Hackintosh on normal Intel hardware, but still it's not stable and well there are hardware compatibility issues. So well other alternative to using MAC OS is either to purchase MAC hardware(which would be naturally expensive) and run full fledged MAC OS or you could tweak and customize your Ubuntu desktop to look more like MAC OS X.