Clearly, many consider Virtualbox a very good alternative - depends on the uses, I think. Mine is for running Linux and Windows VMs simultaneously, to create a development environment that closely models actual production environments. Workstation/Player is very good at that. And Player is free. I prefer Qemu-kvm for testing and simple running purposes. VirtualBox seems to place itself between those, thus it is not that interesting for me.

And, using the patch presented, there is no real problem getting VMware 8+/4+ to work in 7.0.2.