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#1 - not quite correct. You don't need to run enterprise edition within a VM, but it does give you 4 licenses for Windows to run. BUT ... this also applies to VMWare. You can buy Enterprise edition and get 4 licenses to run on VMWare, or even better, buy Data Center edition and get unlimited Windows VM's on Hyper-V or VMWare. You can install Standard, Enterprise or Data Center if you get Data Ceneter edition.
All Microsoft virtualisation licensing (as far as I'm aware), covers Microsoft and non-Microsoft virtualisation solutions (like the System Center license).
Having said all that, Virtual Center is more expensive than System Center VMM. VMWare is more expensive than Hyper-V for similar capabilities, but definitely isn't 3 times more expensive.
I am using vmware in critical production and have tried hyper-v so on the first comparison:
1) you dont need win.enterprise to run inside vm's in most cases, so this is brought up to inflate the price in the vmware scenario,
2) certainly not close in functionality, this is ONLY ON PAPER, sadly MSFT is a few years behind in technology, performance if far better in Vmware which means you can use lower cost HW to run more machines, & yes I did test with the msft sythetic drivers installed.
3) ease and speed of deployment and management in vmware is second to non on big farms which trasnlets to savings,
on the SECOND unfair comparison, vmware has FREE ESXi which is almost like their top ESX without HA+DRS+local shell but same performance, and similar manageability, so compare free to free please, vmware wins again.
*NO FREE P2V/V2V with MSFT hyper thingy,
which is the biggest reason im not using it one of the scenario that I would have wa