As I have begun to see numerous rumors in the VMware forums that the next major release will deprecate the usage of the vSphere thick client (and the simple fact that VMs created using the most recent extensions include features that cannot be managed with the desktop client) I decided to take the plunge and install the HTML5 fling host client on my ESXi host.
The fling can be downloaded from the VMware Labs site. The standard caveat applies to this fling like anything else that you install from VMware Labs:
I also understand that Flings are experimental and should not be run on production systems.