That may or may not be the expected behavior. I certainly accept that you believe such behavior is to be expected.
It may indeed be the designed behavior. I can not answer either way.
What I can state is the behavior is just silly.
A write protected drive should always be readable.
A failed drive which is not the boot drive should not prevent the OS from booting
More importantly a crash and burn under any circumstance is entirely unacceptable
(by crash and burn I mean non-responsive VMWare application necessitating a reboot of the host computer)
Additionally if there is to be a crash and burn, it should do so without the possibility of destruction to the virtual machine.