[rbanffy]

You are right, of course.

I remember having read about the ReactOS/Wine cooperation, but I completely forgot about it while making my comment.

Still, it's not the kernel side of the driver that requires a bare OS, but the hardware side that requires the OS not to interfere. The foreign kernel can be emulated. A Windows-like OS can help you use hardware that has no drivers for other OSs but I never had this issue, nor know anyone who needs to run legacy hardware that can't also run a legacy OS.