Yes you need to enable Virtualization Support at the BIOS level, so you need to look that up for your PC. Alternatively, we have KStars natively running now on Windows. Download it from
KStars website
Yes, Ekos on Windows can connect to a remote Raspberry PI or something that like that is running the actual drivers. If you don't have a remote computer (i.e. raspberry pi) running Linux, then yes you would need to the use the Virtual Machine.
That's excellent. A PI is on my x-mas wish list. I don't know anything about Linux so there will probably be more questions at that stage. However, I do recognise some of the commands from my DOS days (yes, I'm that old )