who actually uses them?

I've used emulators before. As to the legal aspect of it all, I try to stay away from it (that and I simply don't care). I've heard loads of sites state that it's not illegal if you own the copy, and I've heard from others that it's illegal no matter what (I think it was Nintendo Power that stated this.. I might be wrong and maybe they were just talking about import games, can't remember).

Great for playing classic games though. Love the oldies, especially the FF series, Streets of Rage, Super Mario, Golden Axe, etc.

I refer myself as the Emulator King of my place. I've tried NoSGBA (Nintendo DS), No$GBC (GBC) Visual Boy Advance (GBA), Project 64 (N64), Snes9x (SNES), Connectix and ePSXe (PSone), and Fusion (Sega Genesis), among others.

Heck, I even have emulators for my Nokia phone:
Vampent's Vboy (GBC), Vsun (SNES), and Vbag (GBA

The problem of owning a REAL copy of the game is when it is the game is too unavailable already. Take SNES games for example. No one plays this in console anymore because you rarely see them in the market. As for recent emulation, well... they're just too pricy.:D