Your wording there 'massive probs' is disingenuous. What I said was simply "works better", I never said anything about major problems. In fact, I specifically said the other distro's can be made to work just as well, but it takes more effort.
But to answer your question, I've found desktop performance to be better in Ubuntu for the same specs, many distro's don't play well with pause/unpause (it can cause time skew that messes with things like https certs), and things of that nature. Then of course there's the "easy install", although a few other distro's feature it as well.
Nothing that doesn't have fixes, but as someone who is more interested in getting the work done than tinkering with the linux install, I just go with Ubuntu.
It's a burdon to install VMWare Drivers into systems other than ubuntu, either you use open-vm-tools and loose some functionality or you try to compile vmware tools by yourself, which is really hard on anything other than ubuntu.
However open-vm-tools are getting better and better every day.
In the past I had lots of trouble with them and up to Fedora 18 you mostly needed to rely on the vmware native tooling.
arch had the same.
Currently the only thing which open-vm-tools is missing is the 'unity'-mode. However on Arch you need to rely on AUR to get the filesystem driver and the network driver, which is really aweful on Fedora you can't install these in a easy way aswell.
Only ubuntu has it which is mainly caused since open-vm-tools-dkms is not 'free'.
There is added UI customisation on top, but that's irrelevant to it working better or not as a VMware guest.