My opinion is that experiences differ. I was pretty amazed by the likes of Amikit on my Pentium 4 PC (2.4 GHz). That is until I felt in a really retro mode (the wife was at work, kids in their beds) and thouhgt it was a good idea to run OctaMED soundstudio to make some noise. I did that on lots of occasions when still running an A500, later the A3000, A2000 and A4000 and I had loads of fun doing so. But on Amikit it didn't come near to the real fun. It seemed like ages between hitting a key and actually hear the sound!
Naturally I blamed Amikit and did a minimal UAE install, only to find out that it didn't really matter. It turns out that emulation is good and acceptable if you're running programs in RTG mode (where the graphics are taken care of by the video-chips) and playing audio directly via the soundcard (over AHI). If your application depends on Amiga Audio and Amiga Video than UAE just doesn't any right to the Amiga. You'd be far better of using a true Amiga.
Which reminds me... has anyone ever done a real-life (i.e. gaming) comparisson between the Minimig and A500?