The level of perfection being sought in this article is essentially irrelevant to competition with emulators + illicit copying. The existing emulators are more

The level of perfection being sought in this article is essentially irrelevant to competition with emulators + illicit copying. The existing emulators are more than good enough to be replacements to the commercial offerings (and in most cases, a lot better... e.g. the lookahead rendering). While what you suggest might be a factor in their actions, I don't think it's an especially good one. As far as rolling their own emulators, I don't doubt that they do. But I do doubt that they're doing so without researching the existing open source emulators.