I think perhaps you’re thinking about how to use your Pi the wrong way. I’m not sure what you mean when you say that it will boot up to your laptop, but the Pi 3 is a fully functioning, standalone micro computer that runs linux. When people refer to using it as a headless setup, all that means is that you are running the Pi without a screen, keyboard, or mouse. So you might have it embedded in a project, and you want to access the terminal without having to connect all that up. So you connect it to a network, and you can access the terminal remotely using another computer. That computer doesn’t have to run Raspbian, you just use an SSH client
Running Raspbian as a VM as described in this tutorial is completely separate from your physical Raspberry Pi.
