Why PC Gaming Gets Away With It

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Media publishers have shown time and time again that if that can get away with licensing out their products instead of selling it, they will.

But this is already the case, and always has been.. You don't own any of the software you're using (unless you wrote it yourself), you're licensing it. The distribution model and licensing model are independent of each other in this case.

Saying that we can rely on piracy in the worst case is not a legitimate argument as a judicial court will not buy the "I bought it before and now I can't use it, so I pirated it argument". It's not a defence.

But it is.. Piracy is the colloquial term for copyright infringement. Copyright typically has a clause in there, called the fair-use clause. If you own a license to Circus Charlie from buying a cartridge for your NES in the early 90's, you have every right to use that ROM in any way that you see fit, including in an emulator on your pc. Typically for the emulators the copyrighted part that can cause some trouble is the BIOS of the console that it is emulating.. I remember a couple of PSX emu's being shut down on those grounds. But use of the copyrighted BIOS solely to use the licence you own falls squarely in the realm of fair-use.