I had several problems with the emulator not doing audio recording and playback the same as real devices. Often they don't have the google apis or voice recognition either.
I must admit I haven't found it a big deal to use real devices. I also use Wifi ADB so I don't actually need to mess with cables.
Compared to those long intel instructions, switching simulators on iOS is trivial. I also found them mostly bug compatible with the devices - ie the same bug would appear on both. The Android emulators have historically diverged (I remember the 2.3 days when javascriptinterface on the webview would crash in the emulator but not the real device).