MAME has been doing basically this for 15 years-- arcade cabinets are simulated by combining various common chips (CPUs, video drivers, sound chipsets, ROMs...)

MAME has been doing basically this for 15 years-- arcade cabinets are simulated by combining various common chips (CPUs, video drivers, sound chipsets, ROMs...) with a small amount of glue code. Moving the glue code from a .c file to runtime makes it faster to tweak, but it's not a new idea.