Yes, it is different. But how is that important in this conversation. Here the important bit is: have a tool that enables you to test your iOS code on your development machine. Emulation vs. simulation is not generally important in that.
Side note undercutting my point: there are places, like OpenGL where the underlying hardware is significantly better/different and the iOS simulation is not representative of the real environment. Mostly these only matter to high-end games, and there you better be checking regularly on a list of hardware.
You’re absolutely right that it’s not important to the conversation; I’m just being pedantic and going on a tangent :) But I have seen enough real bugs due to people not understanding the limitations of iOS simulator realism that I would really like it if more people understood the issue.
It also matters in more than high-performance GPU rendering. It’s easy to miss bog-standard CPU performance or memory leak bugs when you’re running software designed for a 1GB Ram, dual core CPU machine on a 32GB, 8 core machine
Side note undercutting my point: there are places, like OpenGL where the underlying hardware is significantly better/different and the iOS simulation is not representative of the real environment. Mostly these only matter to high-end games, and there you better be checking regularly on a list of hardware.