For me, sometimes its not always all about performance. For some of these older machines there's appeal is seeing what results you can get on them. The almost, "instant on" nature, plus some other quirks of the physical device are some charateristics that cant be emulated as well.
Now having said that there's definately things I like about emulation too. As some here probably know Im a big amithlon fan. Having the sorts of raw grunt available to emulation on x86 systems can really freshen up OS3.x. making it not far removed from the NG options.
I love my a1200, but theyre just different kettles of fish.
I think you said it well. It seems we have to different kind of miggy-friendes here:
1.) The retro type that want to play and watch demos/games as it used to be 20 years ago, preferably on a TV with a RF-modulator or a RGB-cable. They are not any speedfreaks and had never owned a accelrator card in their lives.
2.) The kind I belongs to, that still insists and try to make my amiga a real-day-to-day workhorse. We love PPC and AmigaOS 4.1 and try to use AmigaOS for surfing the web, play games, mp3, listen to webradio. We never gave up and had faith for a long time and still thinks AmigaOS has a place beyond gaming.
My initial reason for creating this thread where not to create a blame war about how one should exerience the amiga platform, rather a post to say "hey Amiga still rocks!".
The real thing is still the real thing but not everyone has unlimited space in their homes to have unlimited computers. My PC is already hooked up to my amplifier and so to my flatscreen and my projector and with digital audio from HDMI.
For me it's the same with NES emulators, for two weeks ago I played Kid Icarus from start on my Windows box using a Wireless USB gamepad together with my projector, wow that worked great. Sure I could have hooked up NES to my amp and that would have worked to but would have taken me some time to setup, this was more a click-n-run thing.