The holy grail has been found!
Thanks to
tinjaw for posting about
Paragon Virtualization Manager 2010, which is capable of doing a lot of nice stuff: p2p, p2v and
v2p. I've success done a couple of v2p transfers from vmware to physical hardware, deploying the image to my test machine and, after verifying the basics, now also my laptop (which I use daily). Seems to work just
perfectly, so if nothing bad happens I'll do an even more elaborate setup for my workstation - 5 days until the Win7 RC runs out, so I'm in a bit of a hurry