One other thing that Tools looks after for headless Linux guests: Some Linux distributions need a little extra configuration to support PCI hotplug, so, when installed on those distros, VMware Tools will do a modprobe acpiphp to make our PCI hotplug feature work as seamlessly as possible. Of course, you can use whatever distro-specific mechanism to ensure that the acpiphp kernel module is loaded at boot and you'll get the same effect, and you can ignore this if you aren't planning to hot-add or hot-remove PCI devices to/from your headless Linux VMs.
--
Darius