Thank you for the illustration, Mikero.  I'm a believer that it can happen. 

After performing an installation with an SP1 image of Win7 x64, I was able to confirm that it did boot in an EFI environment (thanks to the steps outlined here for Win7).  Thus, I know my Guest OS has appropriately detected the UEFI and is leveraging it.  However, I still do not see a "Firmware type" selection option in my Advanced settings.

As I mentioned in my earlier reply to John, I'm guessing this is by design due to the many distribution flavors of Win7 (32-bit, 64-bit, 64-bit SP1, etc.).  Maybe it's worth opening a ticket with VMWare, but I'm guessing that it's almost a moot point due to the vintage of the OS.

Thanks to you (and John) for the feedback and assist!