> a friend of mine who is a hardware specialist said, that when loading
> a CPU core into an FPGA you _could_ say that it's an emulation.

I'm far from being a hardware specialist, but as far as I know, you don't actually load any software into an FPGA. What's essentially happening instead is that during configuration, the FPGA's logic gates are wired according to the behaviour specified in the HDL file. The main difference between ASIC and FPGA is simply the re-configurability of the FPGA's logic gates and their wiring. That's why I wouldn't call it emulation.

> In case of the Vampire however, a 68080 as ASIC or 'real' CPU doesn't
> exist, so it's no emulation.

To my mind, even if the Apollo 68080 will be made into an ASIC one day, the older FPGA-based solution won't suddenly turn into an emulation.