Host profiles will transfer a large portion of what you need from ESX to ESXi (but can not work the other way round)
There are loads of people that are going through this, but I have not yet seen any blog posts as to what does move and what does not.
I have however seen a few threads where people say that they are able to migrate host profiles, but they get a few error messages relating to features that don't exist in ESXi and just ignore these.
We're currently going through this same project - once I have figured it all out, I'll post a blog post.
Good luck
One day I will virtualise myself . . .