Where the heck did this "cross compiling is more expensive than compiling natively" myth come from? I've had like 4 or 5 people show up believing that already. It doesn't make any sense.
Using gcc and binutils makes it unnecessarily difficult by requiring a separate toolchain for each environment. Terrible build systems like make/autotools don't help either. Cross-compiling is great with a single universal LLVM toolchain and a build system handling the details.
If you're doing development then you probably want a fast incremental build and test cycle. That means having a virtual machine set up in an automated way.
For building huge projects like Chromium, anything other than cross-compilation from a powerful machine would be horrible.