buying [developer account separate from mac owner]

A developer account does not have to be tied to your personal iTunes account or your Mac purchase information.

I bought my Macs under my original iTunes account. My original developer account, which is also on the free status, is that account. My paid developer account is a completely different account which allows me to use my iOS devices for development and post software to the iOS App Store. I've even had a customer developer account on this machine.

Now, if you are actually talking about purchasing a Mac under one persons name and want to make sure any purchases like OS X are tied to that machine, I think you'd want to use the purchasers name. I'm not really sure how OS X upgrade would handle that but perhaps with OS X being a free upgrade now, it doesn't matter.

Other Mac App Store software purchases can be loaded on multiple machines via _your_ personal iTunes account. I have software loaded on my Mac at work that I purchased through my personal account. It only took signing into the store with my personal account and downloading the software I wanted to load on that machine. The software still runs on this machine too.

I've had valid dev accounts on a hackintosh for years, so there is no tie between the purchase (I never purchased a Mac) and the account.

You can have multiple Developer accounts on a Mac, possibly easier to manage using separate User/login accounts on the Mac.