Its development has been somewhat erratic, and there have been no updates since MandrakeSoft bought the program over two months ago. The documentation is scattered at best. With Wine, you actually can run Windows applications from a Linux terminal prompt. Instead of loading a Windows desktop, Wine simply tries to make your Linux system look like Windows to a Win32 program, by inserting a layer to trap and respond to Windows API calls while directing output to a standard X window. Wine is open source and aggressively developed, two very good things.
Wine is most definitely a work in progress.
The authors consider it appropriate for developers-only at this stage, although they are excited about the prospects of incorporating the work Corel has done to make Wine good enough to host WordPerfect Office in Linux. It's interesting to note that while VMware's virtual machine emulation platform is way ahead of any other Linux competitor, not every feature is at the top of the class. This is not paranoid rambling or unfounded speculation. Apple has also been accused by some in the emulation community of making changes to the later 68K versions of the MacOS in order to hamper emulators. Even VMware wouldn't be immune to this sort of tampering.