If you want to go down the second route you also may be able to get an Intel Atom or AMD Geode board support package (BSP) which will help you develop the drivers. Windows CE itself does support x86 processors, although I don't remember if it supports all x86 processors (instruction sets) or just 486's. This will require the Platform Builder application (I believe it's a plugin to Visual Studio now) and knowledge of the hardware that you are running on. In the second case you will actually need to find or write drivers for the hardware that you want to run on and use.
This will run the OS fine, albeit a bit slow depending on the architecture you choose to build the Guest OS for. In the first case all you need is an emulator, which is provided with the development kit and in a more expensive version of Visual Studio. You should be able to run Windows CE both in an emulator and installed on the device itself as the host operating system.
Windows 3, Windows XP, Windows NT, a variety of UNIX operating systems. (From working with Windows CE 5.0, so there may be some differences, YMMV.) technology preservation, technology emulation, and data migration.
