Well, old consoles are already expensive, some games even more so it's almost a waste to buy them just to speedrun (or even play) some of these games. For Emulators you only need a PC tho' (at least if you get the games the illegal way...) so I would say for people that don't own these old consoles, Emulators are way better.
For people that do own old consoles tho' it's a bit harder. But still, if emulators are accurate enough, there's no reason to not use them since it's way easier to use: Connect the controller and start the Emulator.
In theory, it would make sense to lean more toward emulators because of the technology and deterioration factors you described. The more hardware is involved, the greater difference there will be between machines, but it seems to be the opposite in people's heads. One of those cases of people saying "My personal logic says it's this way, so it must be this way, despite the facts you have, because I don't want to think about, it leave me alone", etc.
I'm starting to think that my dad looked at the cars of his youth the same way that I see some of these consoles. When I was a kid, he had this dream of rebuilding this one model of car the same way the factory built it. I was too little to remember what it was, but I always wondered why he would want to do that when he could just go to a car dealership and buy a perfectly good, probably much more efficient car. But I don't think it was about that. It was about trying to get that original feeling of the original thing. I can totally see my kids walking into the garage, in awe of my set of weird shaped screwdrivers, and I'm on some skateboard up under a half-built Nintendo 64 trying to explain what the "good old days" of video games were like.
An SNES ROM takes up about as much room as a digltal photo. Have you seen your parents digging through boxes of polaroids? That's basically us insisting that each game should be on a big boxy cartridge. We try to point out to them that you can just put them in this computer folder and it is much easier, but some people insist on having the actual polaroid just as some people insist on having the big boxy cartridges.
I think the move from the original to emulator is inevitable. It is only our generation- the ones that actually used those consoles- that cares about the original technology, but the love of the game itself is shared by everyone. I've never owned an SNES, but I've played Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'm getting my nephew into some of these old games, and he may never even know what a "Super Nintendo" even is. That's maybe an exaggeration, but there are much fewer people in the next generation that even care about consoles, and I think the notion that "emulators are inferior" will die off with our generation.
It's hard to imagine that wouldn't eventually be the case; just seems like a matter of time really.
What will really suck is when you have to emulate a PS4 in 2073 from your nuclear fallout shelter, but only really to play like 10 exclusive titles, while every other release is already on PC anyways.
