I'm not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that the emulated processor executes instructions while the SoC doesn't? Every instruction that goes to the x86 is broken down into several SoC instructions, which the SoC executes in order to emulate what an x86 would do. Saying that the emulated x86 is booting/running Linux, but the SoC is not is like saying that computers can't run java code, they can only run jvm.