If you have VMware Workstation 8 like I do, you can simply edit the vmx file to change the virtualHW.version to "8" (from "9") and it seems to work fine. I was doubtful it was going to work that easily but it seems to be ok. Copy/paste etc work, as does resizing the VM window.
Excerpt of the edited kali-linux-i386-gnome-vm.vmx file:
.encoding = "windows-1252"
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "8"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
....
Hope this helps somebody else who didn't realize this either.