I just tried to build Qemu on an Intel Mac. Qemu needs GCC 3.x and won’t compile with GCC 4.x. The configure script for Qemu automatically detects that the GCC 3.x is installed as /usr/bin/gcc-3.3 and tries to use that. The problem is that the compiler is actually a cross-compiler for PowerPC and that it cannot produce x86 binaries. Per this post I found out that using the -arch ppc flag allows the compiler to be used on an Intel machine. Obviously the resulting binary will be a PowerPC binary, but should run under Rosetta on an Intel machine.
Note that I still don’t have a solution for building Qemu on Mac OS X. This post is just a note about one aspect of the whole problem.