Actually as of 5.1 GA, one of the specific SATA (fake RAID) controllers I have (I have 3 different ones) is recognized, such that my disks are seen as JBOD, which is fine for my small scale white-box, test bed. ESXi 5.0, and 5.0 U1 did not work, but 5.1 GA does, go figure.
The specific VMs I run on my white-box are processor/memory intensive versus disk intensive, so using lower end SATA is completely acceptable in my case, but I would not call it fast. No compared to other options, SCSI controllers, true full SATA controllers, etc. for DASD based datastores.
Build for ESXi I am running is 799733. Driver is sata_sil24. Connected to a SAN Digital like 8-bay tower, eSATA, 2 multiplexor, to PCIe 2 port eSATA card. VEN PCI information is... LSPCI output from ESXi... Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Sil 3132 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller.