Completely legal, if not I would never have done it (though I no longer needed it after one of our internal apps started supporting FireFox).
As for intended, the point is *MS gives it away*, hell I have a copy running on my Mac which was given away by MS.
Although I'm certainly not surprised you wasted effort massive amounts of effort just to run something you claim is inferior simply because you don't have to pay for it.
I have not contributed code to the WINE project, so my 'effort' was installing wine (clicking a link in the web browser) and then just running the exe to install ie. I did it because one of the apps we had purchased through a vendor did not work right on FireFox. They corrected the issue and IE is now gone on my box.
Where's your proof? Why should I believe anything you say, I've already busted you for lying on this exact thread!
Got something from Microsoft, saying this is allowed and that you face no liability for running it on Linux?