I should probably explain what prompted this patch in the first place, which is d3d9's DrawPrimitive(). It calls wined3d_device_context_draw() with an instance count of 1 and it has a comment explicitly mentioning how instancing is not a thing for non-indexed draws. FWIW, instance count seems to be specified as 0 for non-indexed draws in all the other d3d versions.
Actually, I remember that, that's from !2282. I don't think it was ever clarified whether 0 or 1 would be the right instance count here, but I suspect it should 0.