That's not something noticeable during basic desktop use. I've used VMWare Fusion a fair amount and I was very impressed. I imagine someone non-technical would not be able to tell the difference.
This in reply to the 'essentially piracy' comment below, which for some reason I cannot reply to (too much nesting?)
What's next? Am I stealing music if I put it in a CD player and it makes a 25ms buffer copy while I'm playing?
Fair Use is an important principle. We can't structure our laws to work against Fair Use, or dig ourselves into the absolutely braindead position that exercising your fair use rights of software, music, etc - should be regarded as piracy.
Regarding your first line, the link only appears after a delay, that increases based on how nested the thread already is. It's a feature that is supposed to prevent flamewars by forcing people to "cool off" before replying.
In practice it seems to lead to this, which is worse since it breaks the flow without solving the issue.
I would personally disagree, anything that's GPU accelerated is noticeably laggy inside Fusion and worse in Workstation. Notification Center, Launchpad, Mission Control, entering Time Machine, they all stutter. I applaud VMWare's efforts so far, but it's not the same desktop experience like Windows inside a VM can be. Further, Apple's trackpad and the gestures they integrate adds quite a bit to the OSX experience. No PC vendor comes close to replicating that and it's something you'd have to just resign yourself to never replicating fully.
But ignoring the trackpad, pitting a full screen OSX VM under optimal but real-world conditions against native OSX, I would still bet anyone could tell the difference.
It's fragile hack, and it is against their EULA when the host OS is not OSX, but AFAIK|IANAL, violating a EULA has no broad legal precedent set in the US yet in limiting copyright terms against consumers, e.g. violating a EULA term alone does not make it piracy.
What's next? Am I stealing music if I put it in a CD player and it makes a 25ms buffer copy while I'm playing?
Fair Use is an important principle. We can't structure our laws to work against Fair Use, or dig ourselves into the absolutely braindead position that exercising your fair use rights of software, music, etc - should be regarded as piracy.
To do that is to be a total shithead.