Hence my choice of phrasing: 'wouldn't necessarily protect you'.

So, yes, the switch statemement might be safe, but you would need to prove that your switch statement doesn't use those instructions. You don't get to claim that for free just because you are using a switch-statement.

Conversely, even if you execute bare metal instructions for the user of the VM, you could also deny those instructions to the user. Eg by not allowing self-modifying code, and statically making sure that the relevant code doesn't contain those instructions.

So the switch statement by itself does not do anything for your security.

Tangent: To deny those bare-metal instructions with static analysis, you might also have to flat out deny certain sequences of instructions that, when jumped to "unaligned" would also form the forbidden instruction. That might break innocent programs, no?

Simple: don't allow unaligned jumps. Google's NaCl already figured out how to do that ages ago. (Eg you could only allow jumps after a bit-masking operation. Details depends on architecture.)

But yes, unless you solve the halting problem, anything that bans all bad programs will also have false positives. It's the same with type systems in programming languages.