I bumped against this just the other day and unfortunately had to go down the virtualisation route. The summary is Visual Studio needs Sharepoint Server installed in order to create any Sharepoint Projects, and Sharepoint will only install on a server operating system.
These chaps seem to have come up with a workaround: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx