Emulating the architecture makes sense from the standpoint that you want your development and 'production' (ie, the devices/handsets) to be the same ... but the Android emulator is INCREDIBLY slow. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
Android applications can also rely on ARM binaries developed against the NDK, so full ARM emulation is required in order to realistically test these.
For the things I've done on Android (games, slideshows, etc) I've been able to exclusively use GL and not the Android UI toolkit, so it's simple for me to have a "desktop" target and do all of my real work there, occasionally building for device and testing...