Argh, virtual machines are great... except simple fact: they're S-L-O-W...
Even with vmtools installed, vmware is still provides a decent performance penalty vs real hardware machine.If you have powerful 16-CPU server this may be not a big deal but on usual desktop you may not like obtained performance too much.

As for me, it looks like this:
- If you're going to just see "what is this stuff?" and then throw it away, vmware is great since no reboots needed.
- If you're going to live with <something> for a while and take some real use of it, IMHO it is better to install to a real HDD on a real machine. To be honest, that's how I migrated from XP to Kubuntu (yep, XP is at the end of its life and I dislike Vista, so Kubuntu was just exactly what I needed, he-he). At one day I'm found that on my dual-boot system Kubuntu uptime is just month or so and hence it looks like I do not need any Windows at all ))