Not really anything too new
I wrote an x86 & PC emulator for Windows CE around 1998, it interpreted the instruction set and the standard peripherals of a PC such as the PIC, but also paravirtualused many of the interrupt calls. We didn't call it paravirtualusation back then though. It ran at about the equivalent speed to an 8MHz PC AT on a 33MHz MIPS processor.
ISTR Linux had DOSEMU at about that time too.
You discover weird stuff undergoing such an exercise when you can't get DOS to boot: one or two undocumented processor features were used for example.
The market? As the article states, there are shedloads of vertical market niche applications out there that will never be re-coded in this month's hottest language/framework.
It was both a shame and a stunning marketing fail that Microsoft deliberately crippled Windows RT to Modern UI only apps from third parties, that pretty much killed it off before it was born. Maybe they did learn something.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
