It's good for green field projects, but it's also good for legacy projects. You may need to do some mapping tricks, but it offers reasonably flexible mapping.
Since you can use native queries, and since you can integrate it with your favorite caching solution, you don't need to suffer any performance problems just because you're using Hibernate. When your db administrator says that you should use memcached, you can use this memcached/Hibernate integration. You can write a caching implementation using your favorite cache and plug in into Hibernate. When she says you should use this optimized query, you say "great! Hibernate has a native SQL facility that will let me use that query". You can use native Oracle syntax, you can use the native syntax of whatever RDBMS you've chosen.
A multiple-application environment poses the same challenges to Hibernate as it does to any solution. If you want your application to perform well, you will use what amounts to a second-level cache. Hibernate happens to offer an ORM that is integrated with the cache. It doesn't solve the problem of coordinating a cache across multiple applications, but you'll have to solve that problem even if you don't use Hibernate.
