[antiRepublicrat]

Honestly, I'm thinking why bother with VMWare and other virtual machines now free.

[N3WBI3]

(1) Unlike VMWare wine does not add the extra overhead of CPU emulation, does not reserve a given chunk of memory for a VM.
(2) Wine shares directly the file system of the host operating system, no need to depend on SAMBA or NFS to share files between a VM and the hosts. A side benefit is you can save yourself a couple of gigs worth of windows operating system install on the disk.
(3) Windows application can be called directly by native os components, for example links in your email or chat programs can directly open internet explorer.