I like the idea of using it to provide a "safe" execution environment for untrusted C++. I imagine bochs or other similar user-mode emulation could also work, but this benefits from being smaller and thus having less of an attack surface (theoretically).
I've seen some similar stuff with that too, yeah! Stuff like https://github.com/WAVM/WAVM is really cool, though I imagine this may be lighter (no LLVM dep)? You could also do something like a full system VM using a chip simulation like this, too.
It's also just neat!