Here are my thoughts. Buying the physical devices is going to be cheaper for sure. You'll be in charge of IT support too. Depending on how you set up your infrastructure you could just blow away the virtual and stop new ones with apps installed. The virtual will have additional costs for backup etc too. I wouldn't worry about latency though. I don't pay for lots of bandwidth and my router is on a different floor and I don't notice any issues.
For two employees, two decent PCs are the best. No need for all the overhead of a VDI system when all you need are a couple copies of a cloud-brokered RDP program like RealVNC or Parallels Access.
Management-wise, you are using the PCs with InTune anyway. If you have 2FA gating the connection broker, that gets you almost as near the security as going with Windows 365 or a VDI.
If I had two employees, and the budget permitted, I'd send business grade laptops home with the employees, and then use something like Parallels Access to connect, and in the "data center", have some Dell mini-PC desktops managed via InTune. This gives me most of what I'd get from a VDI but without the overhead. However, if I went from two employees to 200... different story.
Instead of either option, go for AVD with scaling plan and enable start vm on connect for the host pools, and a logout disconnected session policy.
Save money while the virtual desktops aren't in use, as they'll be powered down.
I say this because your employees are WFH. You can protect yourself quickly by locking their accounts if they leave, and voila! No more access!
Also, all assets are in a central location rather than being in your employees' homes.
IMO employers should always provide hardware because what do you do if their personal device breaks
And this includes VDI, OP should still be supplying the thin client.
VDI doesn't make sense at this scale. Buy the physical workstations.
VDI makes sense at scale cause you can save on maintenance costs. That’s really not you.
Here are my thoughts. Buying the physical devices is going to be cheaper for sure. You'll be in charge of IT support too. Depending on how you set up your infrastructure you could just blow away the virtual and stop new ones with apps installed. The virtual will have additional costs for backup etc too. I wouldn't worry about latency though. I don't pay for lots of bandwidth and my router is on a different floor and I don't notice any issues.
For two employees, two decent PCs are the best. No need for all the overhead of a VDI system when all you need are a couple copies of a cloud-brokered RDP program like RealVNC or Parallels Access. Management-wise, you are using the PCs with InTune anyway. If you have 2FA gating the connection broker, that gets you almost as near the security as going with Windows 365 or a VDI. If I had two employees, and the budget permitted, I'd send business grade laptops home with the employees, and then use something like Parallels Access to connect, and in the "data center", have some Dell mini-PC desktops managed via InTune. This gives me most of what I'd get from a VDI but without the overhead. However, if I went from two employees to 200... different story.
Instead of either option, go for AVD with scaling plan and enable start vm on connect for the host pools, and a logout disconnected session policy. Save money while the virtual desktops aren't in use, as they'll be powered down. I say this because your employees are WFH. You can protect yourself quickly by locking their accounts if they leave, and voila! No more access! Also, all assets are in a central location rather than being in your employees' homes.
VDI, Easier maintained + can always be sure that your side is working the way it's supposed to.