Can MAC OS 10.4 be installed into VMware from a winodws machine as long as I point it to the cd rom?
Also what about Linux? I see live cd iso images all over the place, can I use these iso images?
Apple's EULA for OSX does not allow you to install OSX on non-Apple hardware. This includes virtualized hardware, at this time. So simple answer for OSX is no.
Linux is pretty much allowed for for any machine. Go ahead and boot the Live CDs.
In addition to the EULA, there's also the technical issue that OS X uses EFI, which no VMware product (or any virtualization product that I'm aware of) supports.