Wow, thank you for the detailed how-to! This worked perfectly.

I'll just add that the installer did mention the certificate being expired but I was able to click a button to continue anyway, without needing to change the system clock or anything like that.

I had previously had trouble dragging and dropping to and from the virtual machine but your note to install VMware Tools on the VM was a necessary step I was missing.

I don't know the technical reason, but as dempson mentions, the InstallMacOSX.dmg disk image and the resulting InstallMacOSX.pkg installer aren't usable by VMware to install the OS. It's only the resulting Install OS X Mountain Lion.app application (or corresponding name depending on the OS version) that is usable as an installer. And as they explained, newer Macs can't run the older OSes, so I did this all within an existing VM running the same OS version as my computer itself.

What is the reason that the technical check for OS version / hardware support gets skipped when being run within a VM? Did Apple do something intentionally to make it easier to run virtual machines, or is it because it can't determine the hardware and it just therefore allows it?

Thank you!