There's a bunch of documentation that lead me to believe it should work.
For example:
open-vm-tools with clipboard and drag and drop on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr · GitHub
Ubuntu Manpage: vmware-user - GUI tool "Without a running vmware-user process, interactive X11 sessions will lack GUI features such as drag-and-drop (DnD), file and text copy/paste, dynamic display resizing, and Unity."
So it seems I just need to mount the vmblock filesystem and run the process - which doesn't work - and so I thought I was just doing something wrong.
When you say it doesn't work yet, is this based on some official VMWare documentation?