It's kind of a crazy question because vmware produces a lot of products..but yes I have paid for certain vmware products...they do have free ones that for all intensive purposes could be used to do the same thing essentially but if you have a need for something with more options I would openly say every one of the products of theirs that I have tried was absolutely phenomenal all things considered.
I also used an early version of VMplayer a long time ago on I think it was a dual core with 2 gb of ram and it was ok with xp running an instance of xp..you need memory and fast drives to really be able to enjoy virtualization of things like osx or windows 7 with all the bells and whistles. Having a dedicated drive for virtual machines is not a bad idea either.
If your looking for an endorsement, I would say yes...absolutely don't worry about investing money into their products if you can afford it but you are the next buyer not me so test out what they allow you to and make that decision for yourself.
http://www.vmware.com/products/
The price range is from free - over $10,000 pending what you are looking at...but to be honest a lot of what they do have isn't able to be fully utilized or afforded by your average person...they do a lot of stuff that is for arrays of equipment worth the cost of your average house give or take an addition.
Workstation is not free as you can see on the list but you can try OSX with
vmware player which for playing around or working with one vm at a time ...it's all you really need... I have the hard drive space to offload whole intact operating systems for specific purposes so I do so using workstation to load and use multiple OS's simultaneously from HDDs which I swap as I need specific operating system setups available pending my tasks at hand and it keeps things organized and easier to find for me personally. If you have the money for workstation grab it...but by all means try player first and see if you even like it before doing that.
These are free, you just have to register at the site to get the license and download access to their products.
Note that you will have to create a blank virtual disc and copy some files into it in order to install from an osx disc, unless you find something out that I couldn't...but either way..once the virtual disc is prepared OSX works nicely as a vm and once you get the virtual disc prepared you can keep a copy of it backed up and just paste up a copy of it into your virtual machines folder and load that vm by whatever you renamed the copy to and then install your Apple os from there.