One curious idea my friends have entertained is to go one level even deeper and emulate the very transistors that make up the NAND gates on the web, too. It would certainly spell disaster for performance, but it's without-a-doubt interesting.
If not, I think a NAND gate is made of just two transistors, so if you mean emulating how transistors should behave then I don't think it will affect performance more than ~50%
Do you know any resources that document the transistor to logic gate translation?
The electromechanical relay is a very simple device to understand, if you're willing to just believe that electromagnets produce magnetism (without understanding why the universe works according to Gauss's laws on the relationship between electric current and magnetism). It's a coil of wire where an electric current produces magnetism that physically pulls a switch open or closed.