Makes sense to me, then again I know NT inside out...
It's NT's syscall translation layer, CPU mode switching backend and entry point front end. It was originally used to run 16-bit apps on 32-bit platforms but is now WOW64 so is to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit machines.
Basically it's a very light weight virtualisation layer.
And it works well. My circa 1996 RPN calculator I wrote in VC++ works perfectly on 2013 x64 machine.
I always assumed that was to placate business customers who might have (justifiably) worried that Windows 2000 was related to Windows 98, rather than descending from NT 4.
That's really what it is. 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows are running in what is essentially an emulation layer. It's a fairly thin layer now, but remember that the original 64-bit Windows ran on Itanium. The original Itanium had an embedded (slow) x86 chip for compatibility. I'm not sure if WoW ever used it, but certainly the WoW for Itanium 2 didn't, since it was dropped for that processor.
It's an API compatibility layer to allow 16-bit Windows programs to run on 32-bit Windows -- or, more recently, 32-bit Windows programs on 64-bit Windows.
Recently Microsoft went full Keanu with Windows on ARM or WOA -- but eventually they changed that to Windows RT (which might be actually worse).
