i picked up Vmware over turkey holiday for 10$ after competitive rebate (which I havent got, yet).
Overall VMware feels slower to me than parallels 3.0. Even with dual cpu turned on. I may go back to Parallels 4.0 in a few months, but Im still happy with the dual cpu support for compressing stuff in my Fusion VM for 10$!!!
I know VMware is the industry standard, but parallels just seems more polished on some things. I do like how Fusion will take a usb device if the fusion window is active.