NO! it is not the new ESX version! (there are other products that VMware sells besides ESX you know)
Besides Update 4 for ESX and ESX3i that were released last week:
What's New
With this release of VMware Player, certain new features and support have been added.
Support for New Guest Operating Systems
VMware provides support for the following operating systems for Player 2.5.2:- Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2
- Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
- openSUSE 11.1
- Ubuntu 8.10
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
- Asianux Server 3 Service Pack 1
- Fedora 11
- FreeBSD 7.1
- Mandriva Linux 2009
- Microsoft Windows 7
- Novell SLE11.0
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8
- Sun Solaris 10 Update 6
- Ubuntu 9.04
Besides the new operating systems that were supported – there are several other issues that were addressed with each release.
Go forth and Virtualize!!