Indeed, the core concepts are essentially exactly the same. This is a lot simpler of course because it doesn't need to do anything with drawing or sound.

I really like this project https://github.com/juchi/gameboy.js/ . I'd like to do something similar myself but more in the coding style I've used on the 16-bit VM.

Yes, there are some similarities to how you would write an emulator for a real piece of hardware. It would be possible to write an emulator for whatever hardware you can find enough information about.