It all depends on what kind of user you are. If you prefer audiovisual quality and quality-of-life additions and do not mind a few accuracy issues, Dolphin is for sure the superior option. If performance and accuracy is your goal, than the console always win. Only emulators such as Higan can "perfectly" reproduce the accuracy of a console. Audiovisual quality comes with a cost of course, the wii for is example is limited to 480p (576i is an additional option for PAL) and using Dolphin at 1080p... Well that is not exactly repoducing the console at it should be.
I see Dolphin more of less as an system that that overcome the limitations of the hardware of the Wii (and GameCube). It is perhaps not that fun anymore keep play playing those old games from 2002 or anywhere between in such low resolution and texture sizes. The games itself remains timeless in gameplay, so that will never grow old, but their audiovisual quality will over time. Luckely thanks to Dolphin these limitations can be overcome through features such as texture packs, custom resolutions, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, 24-bit color (new recently), Dolby Pro Logic II emulation, CPU Clock Override, codes for increased quality, custom controller support and much more.
In the end, it all depends on if you really want to stick to the playing the "original" game or you rather play an "improved" version while don't minding a few texture and framerate oddities. Most of the popular Nintendo games (such as Mario, Zelda, Metroid) are in fact playable without major issues. I guess there are still plenty of odd Wii games which might not boot yet (all GameCube games do boot in fact) or get past the select screen. For me, the whole point of buying my Wii in the first instance was for those exclusive Nintendo games, the rest of the games I would like to buy would eventually get released on PC. But the approach of improving these old games through Dolphin is not unique here, the same approach also applies for older PC games. Gameplay is timeless, but audiovisual quality not, so that is worth improving upon that to ensure their legacies.
I see Dolphin more of less as an system that that overcome the limitations of the hardware of the Wii (and GameCube). It is perhaps not that fun anymore keep play playing those old games from 2002 or anywhere between in such low resolution and texture sizes. The games itself remains timeless in gameplay, so that will never grow old, but their audiovisual quality will over time. Luckely thanks to Dolphin these limitations can be overcome through features such as texture packs, custom resolutions, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, 24-bit color (new recently), Dolby Pro Logic II emulation, CPU Clock Override, codes for increased quality, custom controller support and much more.
In the end, it all depends on if you really want to stick to the playing the "original" game or you rather play an "improved" version while don't minding a few texture and framerate oddities. Most of the popular Nintendo games (such as Mario, Zelda, Metroid) are in fact playable without major issues. I guess there are still plenty of odd Wii games which might not boot yet (all GameCube games do boot in fact) or get past the select screen. For me, the whole point of buying my Wii in the first instance was for those exclusive Nintendo games, the rest of the games I would like to buy would eventually get released on PC. But the approach of improving these old games through Dolphin is not unique here, the same approach also applies for older PC games. Gameplay is timeless, but audiovisual quality not, so that is worth improving upon that to ensure their legacies.