Depending on your perspective, virtualization’s purpose is to afford divergence and convergence. It affords the division of logical objects that should be separated, and/or the consolidation of objects that should be grouped together.
The technology’s recent explosion coincides with the trend of consolidating systems on to fewer, but more powerful hardware. With more robust hardware, consolidation makes cost-effective sense. And given consolidation for the purpose of reduced management overhead and more efficient hardware utilization, virtualization makes a great deal of sense.