I would love to get one of these as an emulation station, however I can't buy it for a month or so. Is there any way to get the software running on my PC via virtual PC, so I can tinker with it all then copy it onto the Pi when I buy it?
I doubt it because emulators on the Pi are built specifically for that architecture compared to your PC.
Also, I highly doubt that emulators on the Pi 2 will be that much more powerful than the same emulators on the first generation. The single core frequency only received a boost of 200mHz so the software will need to be rewritten to take advantage of multithreading across all four cores.