> At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).
I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.
WINE runs most applications extremely well. With actual backing from a MegaCo, especially the MegaCo that owns all of the IP around Windows, I have no doubt that a year of work would round out the rough edges such that compatibility differences don't exceed what would be expected between major versions of Microsoft Windows.
I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.