Well I had no luck with the boot process hanging during initialization.  I searched a little, and came across this thread, stating :

The line that says “Running inside a VM; adjusting spinout timeout to 180 seconds” would suggest that KVM implements enough of our backdoor interface to make it look like we’re running under a VMware hypervisor.  When we’re running in this environment, we use the backdoor to get the host TSC frequency.  I suspect that KVM doesn’t implement the “GETMHZ” backdoor call, so we are confused about the TSC frequency.  The 30ms delay turns into … 30 hours?  30 years?

So they had a source code change for QEMU 1.7.0, however it obviously doesn’t work in 2.x.  It was rolled up stream, and then made into a switch to disable with a simple flag to add into the command line.

-machine vmport=off

So with that set I ran the following:

kvm -vnc 0.0.0.0:1 -cpu host \
-machine vmport=off \
-m 4096M \
-smp cpus=2 \
-drive file=esx-1.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk \
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5001,server,nowait \
-monitor tcp:127.0.0.1:6001,server,nowait \
-cdrom /root/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.5.0.update03-3116895.x86_64.iso -boot d \
-net none \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:00,netdev=esx-0 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:01,netdev=esx-1 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:02,netdev=esx-2 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:03,netdev=esx-3 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-0,udp=127.0.0.1:10000,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20000 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-1,udp=127.0.0.1:10001,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20001 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-2,udp=127.0.0.1:10002,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20002 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-3,udp=127.0.0.1:10003,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20003

And now I can boot up, and install VMWare!

By default you will not be permitted to start any virtual machine.  To get around this you have to enable VMWare to run nested.
Add the following to /etc/vmware/config under ESX:

vmx.allowNested=TRUE

And then you are good to go!