if the copy is local since the clone process is happenning between two datastores on the same host
Yes the copy will be local within the datastores of the ESX servers. VC will not have any purged copy nor powercli even. The VC as well as powercli just trigger the same vmkfstools or the corresponding disklib functions to copy the flat-vmdks, vmkds and register the vmdk to the corresponding flat-vmdks.
Please let me know, if that is your query, else could you help me understand a bit more of your query?