Existing users, 
Let me start by saying I have licenses for both. This is the best release for Fusion to date. I've used both Parallels and Fusion, and I'm done with Fusion. Everyone talks about how bad Parallels support is, but guess what? I've never needed support for Parallels.
My pet peeves:
#1. Fusion kills my Airport signal 100% of the time within 1-2 hours of use (today was 45 minutes). This alone makes the program useless to me
#2. Unity sucks. If you're trying to use XP seamlessly then Parallels with Coherence is the way to go. With Unity, you can't hide individual apps, you can't use the application switcher, Minimize to dock works, but looks like crap coming out of the dock. Also with parallels drag and drop works better. You can also right click a document and choose which application (Windows or OSX) will open it.
#3. Parallel's GUI seems significantly faster to me (MBP 2.33ghz, 3gb ram, Windows XP pro) I don't use any CPU intensive applications so I'm not sure what the benchmarks would show.
If you're looking to run Windows as seamlessly as possible. Parallels wins hands down. Be warned though, from forum to forum, people complain about the lack of tech support for Parallels. I've been lucky and have had NO problems with Parallels (including beta builds)
VMware Fusion
Run windows & other x86 systems side-by-side with os x.
Version: 3.0
I'll wait until ver 1.5 or 2.0
Feedback Type: Review
Contributed by: Olu070 Wednesday, September 26 2007 @ 11:43 AM PDT
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: 1-6 months
Overall Rating:
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Comments
I'll wait until ver 1.5 or 2.0 - Olu070
That's your experience. Mine is different. Haven't found a windows only printer or USB device that doesn't work flawlessly.Like I said before, the majority of online users praise Fusion, for now, I'll pass
Thursday, September 27 2007 @ 07:33 PM PDT
I'll wait until ver 1.5 or 2.0 - sparcdr
The reason their GUI seems faster is because it is a cheap Carbon application. Carbon is not the recommended framework, especially now that 10.5 is out, it isn't 64-bit capable. Carbon and Cocoa being frameworks, are written with different uses. Carbon uses regular C, and Cocoa uses Objective-C. Objective-C's "prebinding" and dynamic runtime, similar to some Java features, is slower because it takes more instructions. Objective-C is a set of extensions to regular C, but they integrate differently with underlying system daemons, the kernel, and other applications, although both can be used interchangably with each other in the same program or be interfaced with others written with either language.Applications using Cocoa are more flexible, better integrated, because Apple's preferred framework for their applications is Cocoa. Regular C is faster, and Parallels uses Carbon, so it IS faster. Problem with it is that the actual engine, or virtual machine core, including Parallel's BIOS in Desktop do not match the stability of VMware's. This is partly to blame on it being a quick and dirty port from their workstation product, bad architecture, less employees, and a more chaotic development cycle.
The strength of VMware is not in the GUI, although it adheres to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to a T, while Parallels' feels alien, is the actual engine under the hood. It's more stable, it doesn't have so many strange bugs with its background processes like Parallels. Speed wise I'd say they're on par, depends on usage. How much is stability worth to you? I've followed both products since they came out, including pretty much all betas, and Parallels is very unforgiving, it likes hanging the system just with opening the GUI.
Keep in mind that both are front-ends to lots of technical detail underneath, it's not a matter which GUI is better suited, if they find it doesn't work, it's not a big deal to rewrite a front-end for either.
One feature VMware is not at parity with is multiple snapshots, it's important. VMware however has better Mac OS X integration, including the GUI and keyboard hotkeys. Parallels fails with being intuative because it doesn't integrate well enough with the common command + tab, alt + command OS X metaphors, nor does it work properly to make Windows' own easy to access from the host.
Saturday, October 27 2007 @ 12:43 AM PDT
I'll wait until ver 1.5 or 2.0 - slboettcher
Wow, I don't think so.Memory footprint in Parallels sucks.
Can't even connect a USB printer without a kludgy Bonjour workaround.
Won't share VPN tunnel on Mac side.
Fusion does all of that - out of the box.
Parallels has become the Microsoft Office of VM.
Loads of features, too many things don't work right.
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Wednesday, September 26 2007 @ 12:00 PM PDT