Yep, should’ve probably clarified that I’m personally not talking about the US. Housing costs are included in HICP (the index in Europe) but not the cost of purchase AFAIK, only the cost of ownership, calculated via more direct means like rent or energy costs.
For local usage on linux there’s virt-manager, has been good enough for my use at least, and the integrated spice client has relatively good graphics performance for normal desktop use.
Edit: don’t know about a good gui for running qemu on windows, though