*"By the wording, you should be able to run as many instances of the same program as you want to as long as they are all running on the same machine." *

I agree, though how they interpret it may be something else :-) The 'book' comparison EULA was conceived long before virtual machines.. I don't think I've run across one that addresses the point, but I'm sure they exist. I have seen agreements that limit the number of cores you can use.   Originally, AFAIK, VMs didn't even support hardware video acceleration so the issue was somewhat moot for many graphics applications. With today's multi-core and even multi video card systems you can do a lot more. If they want to limit you to one instance per system, real or virtual, they need to state that explicitly because its probably going to come up more and more.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken