Like everything else, it doesn’t matter much. Windows ran on Itanium, Alpha, and as pointed out ARM for over a decade.

Without the ISVs, it’s a flop for consumers.

MS has had an abysmal time getting them to join in on ARM, only starting to have a little success now. Saying “Ha ha, just kidding, it’s RISC-V now” would be a disaster. That’s the kind of rug pull that helped kill Windows Mobile.

Emulators aren’t good enough. They’re a stop gap. Unless the new chip is so much better than the old it’s faster with emulation then the old one was native no one will accept it long. Apple’s been there, but that’s not where MS sits today.

And if your emulator is too good, what stops ISVs from saying “you did it for us, we don’t have to care”? So once again they don’t have to do it at all and you have no native software.

MS can’t drop their ARM push unless they want to drop all non-x86 initiatives for a long time.