Heh, that's actually kind of a neat, serendipitous, not-really-neat-because-this-shit-should-fucking-work-by-now-it's-2013-fer-chrissakes fallback.
That being said, Emoji seem to work at least on Mac OS X (current) and Windows 8. Alas, Chrome doesn't render them within a page (but in the tab/title bar, maybe because the OS' rendering takes over there). Firefox and IE show them both, apparently (presumably because both are DirectWrite-based by now).