The emulation scene is more extra than I can handle atm, so I'll focus more on the XBMC Foundation:
What more can they do? They make a legal product with plenty of legal and licensed uses and they did their due diligence to prevent piracy via their product as much as possible. They also did so without being hostile to customers and unnecessarily locking-down their plugin system.
A little virtue signaling can go a long way sometimes.