Of course, none of this ever materialized, because for some reason, the knock-off manufacturers are still just making consoles that are chip-compatible with NES games, rather than speccing out builds based on what chips have become equally cheap since then. Who knows why.
Actually, there are now quite a few Chinese GBA clones on the market, and my understanding is that they do not use emulation but are hardware-compatible reimplementations of the GBA hardware.
Some examples:
http://exeq.ru/produkcija/pristavki/detskie/gamebox.html
http://obscurehandhelds.com/2010/08/the-nintendo-game-boy-ad...