They literally enable you to play a console and its games without purchasing either the console or the games. This seems like a straight-forward case of piracy to me, how on Earth did a court of law ever rule otherwise?

>b-b-but you don't HAVE to pirate to use an emulator! you can play games you already own :)
I've never ever bought this excuse, the number of people who use an emulator without ever pirating has to be pathetically negligible, like 0.0001% of users at best. And even if you did, you're still "pirating" the console itself so to speak.