I've been following this discussion with some interest. I am a former Iris/Lotus/IBM employee, and I now run the Winecentric pages www.winecentric.com, basically a faq on how to run Lotus Notes and other programs under WINE.
I have had unofficial conversations with Lotus product development managers; they have reacted to customer requests for the Lotus Notes client on Linux by doing their own testing, and they even publish an official page outlining how to run Lotus Notes with WINE. They don't offer customer support (that would cost millions).
The best way to get IBM to sponsor WINE development is to persuade them to port their flagship applications to Linux. IBM/Lotus have a long history of using API translators to port products across platforms, including Lotus Notes and SmartSuite.
If they were persuaded to port, say, VisualAge for Java and SmartSuite, using Winelib, we'd gain some new applications plus (hopefully) IBM would contribute any Winelib enhancements back.
Just my 2 cents...
Dan Schwarz help@winecentric.com