Yes, it can, with some caveats: the registry has to be set up correctly,
and the name has to be NetBIOS-legal (15 characters or fewer, no NetBIOS
special characters, which are different than DNS ones.) It's especially
the fact that the registry has to be set up that makes this less useful.
Not sure how important NetBIOS is, but what do you mean by "the registry has to be set up"? Is it something that needs to be added to wine.inf and/or something added to winecfg? Or, would just documenting it be the solution? I'm pretty sure we have no docs on it right now.
-Brian
