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Wine may maketh glad the heart of man, as the saying goes, but when that man is a Linux geek, all bets are off. That's at least one conclusion that could be drawn from a contentious two weeks or so on the Linux blogs following comments Mark Shuttleworth made at the Ubuntu Open Week workshop series over IRC late last month. The topic, indeed, was Wine; specifically, during a Q&A, Shuttleworth was asked which he thought was more important to Ubuntu's success: native Linux ports, or Wine and Windows compatibility in general.
IMO, Wine is still an important part of Linux. But, with today's virtual machines, Wine's importance is diminished. I type this right now from a Windows machine, hosted by VirtualBox on a Ubuntu machine. I flip seamlessly between applications running on the two machines. I'll agree that native ports of applications are probably more important than anything else - but we just don't see those ports happening. Like it or not, Windows apps are going to be important to consumers and to businesses for a long time to come, and VM's are the best, and the easiest, solution.
