It is a virtualizer. If it was an emulator I would be "emulating" OpenFirmware, 10.9DPs and windows 8 (who's DMGs and ISOs sit on my desktop while taking up large amounts of HDD space) on my 7970 and 7850 (that are occupying PCIe slots for looks) and crysis III on my PowerMac. I would then sell my 1500$ AMD PC, and get two Power7s and "emulate" the newer OpenFirmware that is required to run it. As you can see, Wine is just virtualization, which is great in the fact that it will allow me to play Crysis III on a Mac Pro, but is still won't let me play it on my G5 without some kind of other emulation.