Well it seems to me that netflix doesn't feel it is necessary to do business with linux users. This is not showing much ambition in netflix's behalf. Is netflix a subsidiary of microsoft?
No, they're a business and apparently have decided that the loss of revenue from trying to support the 1% to 2% of users running Linux, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD isn't worth the cost of switching to something other than silverlight, particularly since they would have to find an alternate technology that supports a form of DRM. (Without a form of DRM they simply aren't going to get any content providers willing to allow their content to be streamed). That said, Microsoft is actually moving away from the desktop as a platform fore Silverlight and aiming more for the mobile market. The "ideal" method for netflix to use would be HTML5, but again, without a form of DRM no content providers are going to be willing to provide content for them to stream. There is already Moonlight, but it's not quite "good enough" an implementation to run NetFlix, particularly since it doesn't have the "PlaysForSure" DRM implementations that Netflix requires (again, without which they probably wouldn't have any content to stream to begin with). Same issue with an HTML5 implementation.
Just a suggestion (wishful thinking), but have you tried WINE? There is probably a reason why it won't work or Geek-9pm would have suggested it. WINE has worked less than half the time for me, and I don't know if it works with mint, but it should. It just might not work with netflix.
The closest you can get with WINE is to install WINE, install Firefox for windows under WINE, change the useragent string in it to "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6", close and relaunch, Browse to netflix.com, log in, and go to the watch instantly page. Magically, you'll be transported beyond the "OS not supported" page you're used to, and you'll be given the option to install the Silverlight plugin. Do so. Then you can happily crash. You'll be able to get garbled display for a few seconds before it does so. Since Netflix works fine on the netflix boxes that get connected to televisions and those boxes themselves run a form of embedded linux I'm not sure why either netflix or some enterprising Linux user hasn't found a way to get the same stuff from one of those boxes running on a desktop linux distro.
In either case, it's not like netflix is the only option; there are a few other video streaming sites, that support *nix OS's, such as Amazon Video On Demand for Linux. The fact is if most people are going to set up a dual boot or a similar configuration just to run netflix they (netflix) aren't going to even notice that small percentage of users who are using Linux, since they have set up a dual boot or something to use netflix anyway.