On The Legality Of Emulators?

identity0 asks: "I was looking at old Slashdot stories, and there seems to be a few stories about various console emulators being sued for copyright and/or patent infringement. Now I have a question: is there a legal difference between "hardware emulators" like the console emulators, and "software emulators" like WINE? And what are the legalities of both kinds of emulators? The WINE FAQ says it's not an emulator because 'Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips.' - but since Windows also only runs on Intel boxes, I think I can call it an emulator."