I'm not sure you can compare time machine to vmware. Time machine does not allow you to run virtual machine instances. On the Mac VMWare Fusion or Parallels does though. Time machine is a very slick gui based backup software.
VMware also for the same same snapshot view of past states of the computer. The interfaces appeared to have the same look. If you are using virtual machines for your computing, this roll back feature would be identical to the functionality of time machine.