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Thank you Pat! Some of these features are out of this world. Downloading now... 
Gave it a whirl with a fresh Ubuntu Hardy install.
VMWare tools almost worked! It all installed fine, building kernel modules fine except vmsock and vmxnet3 which were expected I think. However, on reboot, while the graphics, resizing, et al seemed to work fine, as did the keyboard, the mouse was non-responsive.
Then read the release notes and saw the bit about it not working on Hardy
- will probably try the suggested workaround later, I just mention it because it seemed to work better than that might imply, with maybe only the vmmouse driver not working? I'm not sure (until I do try that workaround) but I've a feeling that replacing the modules with open-vm-tools versions and otherwise doing a normal vmware tools install won't affect the mouse driver which isn't a kernel module?
Addendum: Networking doesn't work either, despite vmxnet building and installing OK during the config stage.
Oh well.
BTW, an alternative way to just install open-vm-tools for now even though Ubuntu removed it from packages for being too unstable (it works well enough) is to just download and install the .deb files they build manually. They can be found here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/open-vm-tools/+builds and I'm about to try that. I just used the open-vm-tools on their own before during Hardy's beta period and it was sufficient for my purposes and involves less messing about than the 'yank the module sources out of open-vm-tools and merge with proper vmware tools' method.
Edit: No, that doesn't work at all. networking still dead, mouse still dead, display seems to be magnified!
Oh well.
BTW, an alternative way to just install open-vm-tools for now even though Ubuntu removed it from packages for being too unstable (it works well enough) is to just download and install the .deb files they build manually. They can be found here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/open-vm-tools/+builds and I'm about to try that. I just used the open-vm-tools on their own before during Hardy's beta period and it was sufficient for my purposes and involves less messing about than the 'yank the module sources out of open-vm-tools and merge with proper vmware tools' method.
Edit: No, that doesn't work at all. networking still dead, mouse still dead, display seems to be magnified!
The point is why bother when you can just as easily create a new VMDK that maps to a physical partition?
There are Firewire devices other than external drives 
That's better, though I don't think it'll stop people from figuring out what you originally said