I address this near the beginning - and you are correct that there are some examples that can have a significant impact on the resulting experience of the software. Emulation is not a 1:1 recreation of the original experience including all of its intricacies. But I'm thinking extremely long-term here, far beyond "what our kids will think about the games we played". I'm thinking about what historians of the distant future could learn from our creations, due to how well they can be preserved compared to other forms of media. Ideally people would have an intuitive understanding that input methods and displays make a tangible difference in the experience, and that an emulator is never going to be a full replication of that - so that hopefully they can study and judge a piece of software with those differences in mind.
Technically this is true of anything that can be represented digitally, but software's interactive nature gives it a much more profound ability to represent our culture and elicit a strong and personal reaction in those who experience it.
Technically this is true of anything that can be represented digitally, but software's interactive nature gives it a much more profound ability to represent our culture and elicit a strong and personal reaction in those who experience it.