To your question... I do not know. For productivity UAE is a very good and cheap solution if you do not need real hardware and the original keyboards before you. I think it is more a emotional than a rational decision.
For games you ideally want to use real hardware, a crt and a standard joystick as this won't introduce any latency. For everything else UAE is adequate.
An FPGA accelerator is cool though, which bypasses rational logic.
