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The "not an emulator" thing I think is good marketing but yeah kinda confusing since it is essentially High-level emulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation

Interestingly that's how video game system console emulators after N64 got to be so fast, my understanding is the core concept is they just convert the machine instructions to x64 and do special linking to link the graphic calls to hardware-accelerated APIs.

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Wine is at least distinct from emulators for recent consoles in that Wine is purely HLE techniques, without a low-level emulation component (although there was some work to integrate Wine and QEMU during the Mac Power PC days). Wine works on the level of the dynamic loader to handle a foreign object file format and intercept library calls, but all the machine code executes natively.

Use of Wine with QEMU was still a recurring topic even on Intel Macs (until this release) because 64-bit Windows binaries use a calling convention that isn't compatible with macOS.

It's also still a topic worth discussing in the context of ARM devices running Linux (be it on a smartphone or a netbook or a single-board PC). There's also the additional topic of whether or not Windows Mobile applications would be worth running via a native ARM->ARM variant of Wine.

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