Free Hypervisor: Read-/Write Scripting with v5?

Hello fellow vUsers,

a few days ago a customer pointed out that with the ESXi 5 licensed as the free hypervisor, using PowerCLI, they could script all they want, including write operations. (Creating, Destroying VMs, Power-On/Power-Off). I was able to verify this in a test environment.

So far, I could not find anything about this in the documentation or product pages at all, so there's no way for me to verify whether this is in error or intentional.

Can anyone shed some light as to what's going on? Is the Read-/Write-scripting going to stay? Is it documented anywhere?

Thanks

-Alex