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.
