I personally never prefer emulators over original hardware ever, but in some cases I can not justify the prices of building a good game library.
NeoGeo do sadly not offer me enough games that appeal me enough to justify me to go crazy and buy tons of games, I want all consoles in my collection but for some I only buy a few games because of prices and play the rest on emulators.
NeoGeo is great yes, but it's all about taste of games, I enjoy the occasional SCHMUP, Fighter, arcade puzzle/racer from time to time but not enough to justify the money for lots of games for it, I tend to keep the NeoGeo games to the few good RPGs and the rest I play on emulators.
But NeoGeo is one of few systems that are hard to play backups on, most common cartridge based systems have a solution like everdrive to play near all games on real hardware and the few games that do not work I buy.
Optical-based systems mostly have some solution either via modchips or custom firmwares in PC CD/DVD-writers or orther software hacks to play backups on.
So most systems out there has some kind of backup solution which is great since I can play vast amounts of games without scouting the internets for games (not to mention the storage space i save).
But sure I still buy all my favorite games for all systems to have the originals, but NeoGeo do not have high priority in my case, I rather spend the money on other systems/hardware/projects.
If you love enough games for the neogeo to justify the prices go for it, if not and you don't want to play via Emulators but another system that has backup solutions, most systems have arcade sticks for them and building your own is not hard if you know how to do it.
The TurboGrafx has tons of good "arcade" games and you can play backups on it thus saving you a lot of money, but there are plenty more systems with great game libraries, it all comes down to taste of games and the amount of money the person is willing to spend
