eshedg wrote: @WoodyZ - You're right - the vCenter standalone is the tool to use. It is what I used to begin-with, and it is how I ended up with a 160GB VMDK.
Then I submit you didn't make proper choices as you walked through the Wizard to begin with! 
If your Physical Machine used disk space was only ~38 GB then you could have initially created the VM so is virtual disk was appropriately sized and not 160 GB.
(BTW exchanging big files between Win and Mac is by itself a story to tell... it is anything but strightforward, if you happen to have a larger-than-2GB file, which I did).
I have to thoroughly disagree. I've been exchanging large files, up to .5 TB each, between Windows and OS X and vice versa using both Network and external storage, whether formatted NTFS and or HFS+, and all without incident or issues and it been totally straightforward. If you're having issues then I'd submit you're not doing something right.
Re issues with "Migrate your PC" - Maybe you're right... I didn't have any problem with it, maybe because I migrated off of a VM running locally on my Mac (V2V, if you will).
You could have installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone in the Windows Virtual Machine and created as right-sized and type disk directly to the external drive and not have to go through all the rigamarole you did!
I will say that the one thing in your original post that has merit is that what should always be done whether doing P2V, V2V or V2P is proper prep of the source and with Windows one can simply run Disk Cleanup to clean up the majority of the non-used data side of the cleanup prior to making the image and as far as the Page File goes IIRC that it a choice to copy or not within the Wizard or maybe vCenter Converter Preferences, don't remember off the top which. Clean up of User Data before migration is of course ones choice on a case by case basis.