If Android gains traction on x86-based tablets and other mobile devices, CodeWeavers has a lot of commercial opportunities for pushing the running of Windows software on Android.
I honestly don't see how there would be that much of a market. Any native Android implementation of a particular program will be much nicer to use than a Wine emulated program. Really the only use I have ever found for Wine and other emulation programs is for running Windows games on other platforms and usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games.
>running Windows games on other platforms and usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games
IME this is out-of-date.. I run PES 2013 with wine. (I haven't tried many other games, but quite a few are compatible). I have to run it on one setting lower, other than that its almost identical to running it on windows, wine is impressive these days. I agree it would be quite limited with ARM, although there are x86 phones.
This is very much a YMMV thing. Some things work an order of magnitude better than others under wine.
I've also had things which have worked fine under wine get an update, or I've updated something else on my system and then all of a sudden it completely breaks.
In prinicple, anything worth having is worth having in a Android-native touch-optimized implementation. But...
There is a lot of software, especially on a formerly hegemonic platform like Windows with a decades-long history, that will never get ported or functionally recreated.
Most of it deservedly so, but some some of it is going to be valuable enough to enough people that a compatibility system will be just the right thing because a reimplementation would take too long and/or cost too much.
usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games.
This is far from universally true - in my experience it is actually slightly backwards. A few years ago I had to benchmark a Windows program against a Linux one I had written, and the Windows program ran slightly faster under WINE than under Windows. (This was mostly computational, without much use of Windows APIs, and no graphics in the timed sections.)
DOSbox has been out for Android for quite some time. Takes a little configuring, but it works. I've seen people running windows 3.1 and win 95 on Android as well.
I honestly don't see how there would be that much of a market. Any native Android implementation of a particular program will be much nicer to use than a Wine emulated program. Really the only use I have ever found for Wine and other emulation programs is for running Windows games on other platforms and usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games.