I believe the Android emulator is now quite different from mainline QEMU. No efforts have been made to merge patches back into QEMU, so the Android emulator is

I believe the Android emulator is now quite different from mainline QEMU. No efforts have been made to merge patches back into QEMU, so the Android emulator is basically a fork of QEMU. That said, ARM development in QEMU is very active right now and its only a matter of time before one of the supported QEMU ARM targets also happens to be a platform with good Android support. TL;DR consider sticking to the official Android emulator for now but keep an eye on QEMU.