You know one thing I got a kick out of is the jumpstart guide to View4 actually has a picture of the VIC and it shows that the VMWare guys have XenDesktop running. (Is that a copyright violation) 
Anyway, I thought it'd be good for me to jot down some thoughts I had when I compared these products side by side. Let me start by saying I have a boat load more experience with Citrix than VMWare. I was a avid XD supporter until View 3 came out because frankly "VDI" sucked (can I say this now without being attacked). So here is a run down of the comparrision. I have about as much experience as you can have on both products I beta tested them and have done numorous POC and even gave a lecture on the two products at a VMUG a year ago. Anyway, heres my update on that lecture.
There are 5 major areas to focus on in both View and XenDesktop they are:
1) Hypervisor
2) Desktop Provisioning
3) Desktop Delivery
4) Application Delivery
5) Base OS
Vmware
1) ESX
2) Composer
3) View Connection Server
4) ThinApp
5) Windows XP
Citrix
1) XenServer
2) Provisioning Server
3) Desktop Delivery Controller
4) XenApp
5) XP
I will compare these by their numbers:
1) For starters I'm not going to spend the time to go into XenServer verse ESX (we are on a VMware forum after all) but that long story can be summed up with one compound word, RAMovercommit (or is that two words).
2) Desktop Provisioning (and forgive my use of the word Provisioning - I learned the CItrix train of thought before the VMware one). Citrix uses a product called Provisioning Server (formally ardence) a very cool product that you should youtube if you want to be amazed. The problem is, it's a product, it's something else to learn and no it isn't like anything else Citrix makes, they are working to make Provisioning look more like a Citrix product but if you look at regkeys you can still see the Ardence name pop up. So I like the product but I don't like having to learn another product. View on the other hand just installs a small plug-in called composer into your already present vCenter server. Very nice, nothing to configure, Composer allows the use of Link Clones so we can have one base image and use that to make as many desktops as we please. I found this process much easier, and that's coming from a guy who has been certifed in Citrix for the past decade.
3) Desktop Delivery. For the Citrix admin the Desktop Delivery Controller is something you are going to love, it looks and feels like XenApp (presentation server) for the Admin who doesn't know jack about Citrix, its yet something else you need to learn. View on the other hand just gives a simple to use Web Site to administer desktop deliver called the View Connection Server. Setting this server up was very simple, but so was setting up the Citrix server. I think someone with little experience is going to lean towards View on this, but someone with Citrix experience is going to like the DDC.
4) Application Deliver. Okay this one is where I just have to show my biast. I don't like ThinApp, I like XenApp. They've been doing it for 10+ years and they are great at application virtualization. However, I don't use either one for my current deployment. I just put the application within the desktop image, it works for me as I don't have the need to virtualize the application. I have a buddy who likes to argue with me on which one of these products is better. The advantage of ThinApp is that there is no infrastructure, XenApp there is a lot of infrastructure in a good design. (I like Citrix for application deliver... shot me)
5) The OS. Okay why would I bring this up, an OS is an OS right. Well, no. You have to do different things in the OS to make these solutions work. For instance in the Citrix world you have to install the Provisioning Agent and make an image of the desktop. I hate this because it takes forever for one, and two because that damn agent is always in the OS showing some pop up or another. View doesn't require this because it just uses snapshotting technology built into ESX to handle the image creation (that and composer - see 2 above). So there is less crap to put on that image in View. In both cases you need to put a special connection agent on the desktop. How else would you connect to your desktop via ICA or PCoIP.
So that's my comparison. In the end I still say the user experience is better on XenDesktop but the administration of View is just drastically simpler. To compare, it takes me about a week to do a POC for XenDesktop, it only takes me about a day to do the same in View. That should show you how much simpler one setup is over the other.
ICA verse RDP isn't a contest. ICA wins. PCoIP vs ICA... eh... i'm less than impressed so far, but it's only been out what... a week. I think PCoIP has a future. I'm still waiting to test PCoIP on a hardware based terminal which my change my mind. But View regardless, the experience with PCoIP or RDP is more than enough to be workable, it's HD videos where you see the difference. Get yourself a Wyse Terminal with +TCX and that should make upt he difference, but I won't lie and say PCoIP beat ICA, it doesn't, but I know one thing VMware is aware of this and they are going to work hard to bridge the gap.
So were do I stand... I have View running. Why? It's simple, it works (even if it doesn't have the bells and whistles that ICA does, I know PCoIP is coming up to speed quickly). I can train staff to use it much quicker than Citrix. Plus most of the IT here already know how to manage Servers, managing Desktops in View doesn't take much more training. So View is my choice product, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that XenDesktop didnt' have advantages. However, there is no way I'd put XenServer in this environment so unless I want to put XenDesktop on top of ESX and deal with the insane licenses cost that would be, I'm happy with my View 4 environment, it works great, and only took me about a day to deploy.
-Gunnar
I want to share some thoughts:
2) Citrix Provisiong Server is an Ardence product - yes. But that also gives you (at least) one advantage: PVS also supports remote boot for physical hosts/desktops. That won't be an advantage soon because it seams that newer M$ OSs support this out of the box 
4) IMHO you compare apples with oranges. Either compare ThinApp with XenApp Streamed Applications or View with XenApp (non-streamed). But I think you state the most important point: Citrix Streamed Apps use an Infrastructure whereas ThinApp doesn't. Both have their advantages: The infrastructure gives an admin more control, management possibilities etc. ThinApp gives you the possibility to be independent of your infrastructure (e.g. ThinApps for Laptops with rare or no access to your company network - AFAIK with Citrix there was a timeout around 30days). Not to speak of TCO if you want to deploy a ThinApp for few users if you don't already use XenApp. Buy do you want a XenApp serverfarm + SQL-Server + Web-Interface + ... (farm -> single point of failure, sql for database, ...) for streaming an app for few users? So ThinApp especially has its advantages in small environments.
FEJF
--
There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and the rest. And those who understand gray-code.