I think he means running linux using a vm. Possibly with vagrant for dev/testing purposes. As far a I now there isn't a general purpose vm for android/arm.(There are some javascript x86 emulators with linux and probably something else but I don't know how easy it is to use for developmnt). android by default doesn't have even a minimal linux cmdline toolset although you can install it.
But not necessarily the Vim / Shell / Apache / MySQL environment which is very useful to Computer Engineers. At least, that sort of stuff is not easily done on a (non-rooted) Android Tablet yet.
