Technically yes... but for consistency purposes there is no difference. I figure that it would be easier for people to speedrun on DosBox anyway because most speedgame communities already allow it, alongside the fact that I don't expect people to go out and by anniversary collections of the Civ games just to speedrun Civ I, especially seeing as that would be a 50-200 dollar money sink for a game from the early 90's. Unless Civ I gets released on GOG or Steam in the near future, consider that the main method of playing Civ. And even then, it'd just be a glorified shell of DosBox as an executable anyway.
Yeah we consider dosbox as emulation. I wish I had a real hardware (and I believe a fast 386 or even 486 will shave off time of the space race category at least compared to 3000 cycles in dosbox).
I have a CD version of Civ1, it's not the version I've been running on. I don't think that would stop me from playing it on real hardware though.