Mono is a perfectly valid platform for running commercial software as a lot of companies have already proven. Some of them you can see here but there is a lot of which you will never hear about as they are running Mono in embedded environments (Sandisk Salsa mp3 player). From the latest news, Electronic Arts is going to use Mono for Sims3. How is that for an argument?
One of the main points of Mono is minimizing the effort for developers coming from Windows to Linux. In most cases no additional effort is required to make the same software that you already have on Windows, run on Linux, MacOS and other platforms in Mono.
Just to clarify some things that other people answering your question conveniently forgot about. Most of Mono (recently even the compiler) is licensed under MIT/X11 license which allows you to pretty much deploy it in under and conditions you see fit. There is no GPL "cancer" that some people seem to be so afraid of.
Personally, I have been playing with F# and Gtk# in Mono and I loved the experience. More about it here. This was possible due to the fact that the F# team has made sure that F# can run on Mono and they provided a simple Linux installer in their release. This should also be a signal that Mono is regarded as serious alternative to .Net, even by Microsoft.