It may be called "virtual console", but all other emulated consoles are indeed emulated - GBA is virtualized, running in perfect real time on a real GBA processor, with only the actual rom and save chip being emulated
the other vc console injects (official or not) use emulation to simulate gameplay but gba vc injects use hardware (the gba was a arm9 device . . . 3ds has arm9 and arm11[i believe]) so it runs gba naively and the gba was not built with savestates