Didn’t bother to actually read the article you linked to huh. It’s all about getting the OS to see the hardware. Like I said, if it can’t see it it can’t not recognize it.
Windows doesn’t know if it’s running virtual or real. But depending on your virtualization that’s going to keep a lot of hardware away from it. I work everyday with faxboards that Windows cannot see in any virtual environment, tried them all and none of them pass the existence of those boards through to a virtual Windows.
The faxboard issue is well documented on the VMWare and VirtualBox forums. Basically, it's not really a modem, it's a winmodem and the expects the host OS to provide most of the processing power. The guest OS tries to load it up and starts contention with the host OS.
Network adapters are not the same. To my knowledge there are no Windows network cards. They all work the same, thus they are presented to a real OS and a guest OS exactly the same.
If one OS can't see the hardware, but another OS can, then it's the OS that's the problem.