Couple of questions:

Is it possible to do any development for the N770 in Windows, or do I need to look into virtualizing a Linux distro?

If I need Linux to do development, what would be a good distro to go with? I know absolutely nothing about Linux unfortunately, but have been meaning to see what the hype is about for some time

Finally, any resources/tutorials on development that anybody would care to share? I'm not totally new to programming - I write C# for a living, and have knowledge in C, and some other crap that is neither applicable or useful.

Just to answer one of your questions: there is a vmWare appliance available for download -- search the forums for this one.