Sorry no - first time ever invoking VMware support (I just don't deal with vSphere enough to ever to do that before) and now we are trying to repeat this KB: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2015499
I have hard time convincing myself that following it to the tee will reveal anything that we haven't seen before but I'm open to be surprised...
pfurnessSKA - what you did will work until you needed to deploy templates with customization as that operation will still fail. In my experiments, you have to revert the host cert to self-signed for that to work. If that's not something you would do for your particular infrastructure then it's a feasible workaround. For me, it wasn't
I will be diplomatic here on their own forums and say that vCenter is probably a very complicated system that just needed to be delivered to the world quickly - we seemingly live in this world of continuously "debugging" software because there just isn't enough time to do it right entirely, because everybody else is trying to beat you first to the market. Windows licensing is a concern for some, and in my particular case, it's far too much overhead to run the vCenter management platform in Windows and me being the UNIX guy that just loathe Windows server for its complexity that I never really uses. It probably just needed time, that time VMware don't seem to have in this crazy race of virtualizing any and every hardware you can just to save some money, only to be paid in license fees.
Back to the problem at hand - I hope someone had actually run those steps in KB 2015499 to the tee and still have that fail, just to prove that I don't actually have to waste time on it again.