Personally I would rather vendors spent more of their R & D budgets improving the reliablity of products rather than developing features I’m never going to use. – of course this won’t happen, as this approach does not sell licenses.
(To be fair to VMware, we’ve never had a particular reliability issue with their products).

80% of the virtual environment where I work are for Dev and Test and 20% for Production.

There is certainly a view that VMware is expensive and that for most of our environments we don’t need half of the features provided in ESX 3 never mind 4.

As the market is starting to mature we are giving serious consideration to alternative platforms for our non prod environments. The main thing holding us back is the investment we have made training up our guys in VMware over the last few years.