Are you still seeing this behavior?
I am seeing similar behavior with esxi 5.1 and a Netgear switch. I'm not convinced it's not a Netgear problem though.
I have the management VLAN on the switch (a GSM7252PS, a.k.a M5300) set to 10 (the default is 1). I can access the switch web interface from my laptop on a port that is tagged vlan 10 and the pvid for the port set to 10.
On ports 1, 2 I have vlan 10 tagged, but a different PVID. The esxi host has a port group in vlan 10, and I have a VM with a NIC in the vlan_10 port group.
From the VM, I can't ping/access the switch address on VLAn 10.
I have other installations with Netgear switches and esxi 5.1 and VLAN's which behave as expected. I don't think the issue is the ESXi host, but more likely the Netgear switch.