Those instructions are not using QEMU to emulate the Pi. They tell QEMU to emulate an entirely different piece of hardware (the versatilepb board) and run the r

Those instructions are not using QEMU to emulate the Pi. They tell QEMU to emulate an entirely different piece of hardware (the versatilepb board) and run the raspbian userspace on it. You certainly won't be able to test any code for the Pi that directly accesses the hardware like that. (QEMU does have some limited real rpi emulation support, but those instructions don't use it.)