So much misplaced emphasis is placed on emulation, which always will remain an imperfect facsimile. It will never, ever replace the feel of having real period-correct hardware. As pointed out already, the main fear is having to settle for "good enough" or "what works" because of price and expense concerns, scalping, and, finally lack of real availability. Personally, I'm not about having the absolute best in retro hardware. I'm fine running DOS on a Core2Duo at 4 Ghz on a generic Socket 478 board. What I'm not fine with is not using a mechanical keyboard, or a non 4:3 AR monitor. A CRT with VGA output is what I want. The problem is non-CRT 4:3 monitors just aren't being made, even though they still *could* be. The ones available now are far, far too expensive and limited to substitute for a genuine CRT. If they were, I'd have no problem with using a period-incorrect LCD 4:3 screen for DOS graphics (provided it could do 70-hz and proper 320x200 and 320x240 graphics). A generic old PCI-based soundcard which give acceptable DOS compatibility and OPL3 sound is fine.
Emulation is a highly-unsatisfactory solution for DOS because of display problems, speed problems, and abstraction layers.