You make a very interesting point about emulation. For older consoles emulation was essentially guaranteed by Moore's law (and specifically the frequency scaling that went for a while). For a slowing down Moore's law, may we reach a point where real time emulation of a different architecture is just impossible? (and instead some kind of translation will need to be done, à la wine?)
An advantage is that architectures are converging anyway to PC-like instead of exotic stuff like Cell.
