Earlier quoted context omitted.
The emulator is a dog. Compared to the iPhone anyways. It's useless for web development.
How many platforms does the iPhone emulator run on? Is it instrumentable and controllable by user applications using nothing but sockets and octets? Didn't think so :-) Android emulator is slow to start, but it's cross-platform, and allows for hot-updating.
It is at its most useful when I want to pull a file from internal storage, which often isn't possible on a device, or when I don't have a device handy, in which case it is a passable solution. It's never, ever my first choice, though.