Sorry to hear about your bad experience Chip. That call to Apple seems unusually bad for a task that every Apple employee should know about (it's an advertised feature, for pity's sake). Oh well... at least you're back up and running now!
For future reference, there are other more robust backup applications that you can use. One that is often suggested is
SuperDuper!, which creates a clone of your drive. This would have saved your VMWare installation and had you up and running in no time. A cheaper (read: free) alternative is
Carbon Copy Cloner. It also clones your drive, but I believe that SuperDuper! has more features.
Hope this helps any future dilemmas!