I am going to bring it up with the support teams director the next time I see him, he will probably tell me to shut up. I did user support for years but my job now is not necessarily dealing with user support. There are always one off type software that will need a beefy desktop, we do a lot of video, photo, and movie editing in some departments and there is no way those users could use a terminal even though the majority of final processing is on a beefy server. Your maps software may need a beefy computer or you may be able to fit the specs into vmware and get a decent solution. But for users who are just viewing and updating data on a database, they really don't need all that much power they just need a stable and relatively fast network connection.

Edit: Here is another scenario that I am suprised I didn't add to the post already. In our company every user wants a Mac rather than a pc. The company will buy them a mac desktop or laptop. But most of the software we use in only Windows compatible. So the support team creates a virtual workstation in the VMware farm so they can rdp to it and get their work done. Most of the IT department users have this set up for them also, so the Mac computer is just siting there doing nothing while the real work is being performed in the vmware environment. It doesn't make to much sense to me.