My radical positions on copyright law aside, in some cases I always say just go for it. Especially if the company went defunct decades ago and used copies are the only way to acquire it. It's one thing when you can pop onto GOG or Steam or Origin and pay for a key that goes to the holder.
In the case of the GCN/Wii/Wii U Nintendo at least burned their discs in such a way that you need the consoles to rip them, a regular drive wouldn't do it like with a PS1 or DC back in the day.
But there's no way I'm going to pull out everything to rip one of my copies of Metroid Prime or whatever to a usb drive to futz around with Dolphin when a new version comes out or I get new hardware. I'm just downloading that shit. Especially since the ripping speed was like a 1x or 2x speed on the drives. (Also it would mirror the whole disc. Like New Super Mario Bros. Wii would create a 4GB image, but you can download a stripped version that's like 200MB which is the actual size of the content that was on the disc.)
The fast fan emulation of the Wii and Wii U and 3DS are Nintendo's doing anyway since they basically just iterated on the prior hardware. The Wii is an upclocked GCN, the Wii U puts three upclocked Wii CPU's together and sticks in a normal graphics card, etc. Developers aren't having to re-write entire things since the hardware itself accepts the same commands. Sony emulation has all but slowed to a crawl after the PSP because the PS3 is a mess and the PS2 situation is still a lot of hacking things together. Microsoft wound up making their own stuff easier to emulate on their own end for their own purposes, that 360 emulator just happened to take huge leaps right as Microsoft started getting their 360 emulation going on the One.
Since the Switch is basically a Tegra I imagine it's not going to take long on it either.
It's funny how people like Laura though make so many faulty assumptions. Like someone won't just play something else on their existing platforms if they can't get Zelda rather than try and buy a Switch and the game.
