At the point that I was trying to solve this problem (and not getting paid as a result) I was unable to find anyone who had successfully gotten SL to run in a VMWare VM or Lion to run in a SL VM. Interestingly, I did find individuals who had Lion running in Lion VMs, but that didn't help me get back up and running.

Edited to add: You are correct, the technical restriction was on the VMWare side, but IIRC it was because of legal threats from Apple. Apparently earlier versions of VMWare would run SL without any problems, but the VMWare version I had would not not and I couldn't get a copy of the older version.