Yeah I know, I previously founded a company doing desktop virtualization on VMware ESX. I know it runs up to $3-5K per server, and that often turns out to be the "cheap" part after you're done with the SAN vendors :)

Even the fortune 500 are complaining about VMware prices though, but they keep paying because their whole datacenters are based on it. Hopefully Hyper-V will at some point provide some counter-weight to keep VMware's pricing in check.