Emulation - thoughts and explanations

What do you guys think of emulation? Gift of the gods or dirt from the devil?

Know what it is? If not I'll explain (just ask)

I think it has mostly good points. One example is this:
A game called Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict was only ever release in Japan. It took years of fan work for just a simple script translation to appear.
Then a couple of years ago, this one guy called z80 implemented a way of being able to apply a patch containing the english script on the game.

So now we can play the game in full english! But of course, it needs to be played on a computer (though apparently you can transfer it to a DS/PSP with work).

Cool, huh?

Yes, I also played Mother 3, which was only released in Japan, on my PC.

But I played it in Japanse, with just the item and enemy names translated.