Can anyone explain the point of this when PlayStation Mobile is an actual legitimate solution?
It is also free for personal use, so surely people could just distribute the code for a SNES emulator online and you could build it on your own Vita without any hacking at all.
Except if Sony wants to pull that emulator or Nintendo does, they can stop you that way. It's like Apple's "closed garden"/iPhone store place, someone complains and they have a legit complaint, you're gone.