Excellent, thank you! This really clears it up. One of the comments on the top answer added an example that unlocked it for me intuitively: “in VMWare you can

Excellent, thank you! This really clears it up. One of the comments on the top answer added an example that unlocked it for me intuitively: “in VMWare you can have a virtualized CD drive which is connected to the real physical CD drive, or you can have an emulated CD drive that is backed by an ISO image on the host.” Virtualization = sharing real hardware. Emulation = software pretending to be real hardware.