You can view the ESXi host directly if you have a video adapter and keyboard connected to the physical ESXi host. You can logon to the ESXi host and change basic things like network settings and various low level configuration tools and access the CLi interfaces for things such as updates if you are not using full vSphere or Essentials. You can also login and shutdown and reboot the ESXi host.
If you are only using ESXi, you would connect to it from another PC using a web browser and download the vSphere client from the ESXi host directly to your workstation. The vSphere client which is downloaded from the ESXi host is free.
As weinstein5 says, the vSphere client this is how you manage your Virtual Machines or ESXi guests. As he says, it is also the best way of managing the ESXi host - once you've installed ESXi.
The terminology can be confusing when u start out with ESXi because vSphere is both a suite of management tools as well as a client, and you do not need to have the vSphere suite to have the vSphere client which comes with ESXi.
The key thing with ESXi is that it is a dedicated box which holds Virtual Machines or guests. Once installed and configured, there is no need to connect a monitor or keyboard to it...the only thing u need is a network connection to the management nic and you can connect to it from the vSphere client.
With VMWare Workstation 8 - you can access ESXi guest virtual machines with an interface other than RDP or View. You can also run up an ESXi Virtual Machine using VMWare Workstation 8.
