You should look at the current state of Amiga, while emulation is possible there are only two Amiga like OSes (AmigaOS & MorphOS) and both are closed source/proprietary.

What am I saying is that having an open source OS for Windows, is a huge deal if you are interested in hardware preservation for the future.

Therefore in reply to the original post about the current endeavor being "sad" I would say that it is quite the opposite.

Wine is very important as well, but it is a completely different piece of software in my opinion.