Yes and no. If you're running *nix, odds are your mostly open-source system will be running software built for ARM. And if you aren't, my understanding is that x86 emulation is pretty good.
Wine can also do this neat hybrid emulation trick. Your x86 application runs in an emulator until it hits a Windows syscall, then it hops out of emulation to run the syscall on native ARM machine code Wine, then jumps back into emulation to keep running your application.
Wine can also do this neat hybrid emulation trick. Your x86 application runs in an emulator until it hits a Windows syscall, then it hops out of emulation to run the syscall on native ARM machine code Wine, then jumps back into emulation to keep running your application.