There already have been OSs supporting such kind of operation: When you simply click the power button, the machine will just go to sleep mode or low-power mode(like stand-by of the Windows or short-clicking the power button of an Android smartphone). The point is that pressing the power button doesn't equal to asking the OS to shut-down itself.
The VMware-workstation, on the other hand, will instantly wait a power-off / halt command from its running virtual machine after pressing the power-off/shutting-down command on the menu. That causes a dead-waiting issue: After a simulated android-OS going dark its screen, there is no way to light it up again. If you click a shutting-down command on the menu then the workstation GUI will stuck itself and you can only make it quit by killing its process with Task-Manager. Same issue is also with an ancient virtual WindowsXP OS, you can choose Stand-By while clicked its power menu but then it won't go to stand-by mode instantly. The screen will just flash once and the system will go back to run.
Generally you man noticed that either the Android or the WinXP is out of support for now, but even within a supported virtual OS, sometime a messed up virtual machine won't respond a shut-down command but all the menu items on Workstation GUI for power commands just keep gray status. In this situation we may kill the corresponding vmware-vmx process to solve it out but if several virtual OSs were running simultaneously then it's a little hard to identify which is the right folk we shall concern about.
I'm just saying, I think it may not be a trouble thing to add a click-only power command[Fn01]. A none-officially supported OS(windows 98/many Linux Mods) can shut down fully even without VM-Tools installed. Does it mean the power commands won't rely on the VM-Tools? if does then we may get such kind of Fn01: when it is clicked, only a power command is sent to virtual OS and no further action(waiting for responding from virtual OS) will do like other vmware power menu buttons doing.
