errr, this analogy is flawed by your apparent bias (afterall, you do have a considerable amount of finances "imprisoned" in physical pinballs), differences between need for speed and actual driving or virtual sex vs real sex or guitar hero vs real guitar are far bigger. why?

first, both virtual (in a really pimped up cabinet) and real pinball have completely same interface. --you're touching real pinball flipper buttons in both. Tactile perceptions are matched. You have contactors simulating coil firing and shaker motor simulating vibrations

-you're watching a projection of a physical steel ball wrecking havoc in a closed box through the glass plate vs. a projection of a drawn steel ball with almost the same physics wrecking havoc in a same sided closed box through the same glass plate. This is not matched 100% due to 2d and drawn graphics, but there isn't a $9000 difference for sure. It's like hi fi audio fans arguing against mp3. it covers all frequences that can be heard, no matter how much they'd want to believe otherwise. but they get outrageous amounts of money to get that 1% performance more and it's more about elitism than actual perception.
Real pinball machine is only a state machine as its virtual counterpart, although one with significantly more states than its model, but not all of those states matter in gameplay (you can't break plastics in VP or get the ball stuck in all those places designers never intended ball to be stuck at). Pinball rules are still governed by the same ROM as in physical one.

Collectors not liking it, but the fact is - visual pinball is far from perfect replication but it gets the job done 90% dead on with much less hassle and for much less money.

Now, the actually correct analogy is this:

VP vs physical pinball is like silicon boobs (can I say boobs on this forum? oops) vs real big natural ones. They are fake and different, but they look real enough (if tastefully done same as in case of VP table), you get to enjoy them in the same way, in the same interface and you break the barrier of being impossible for your girl to be retroactively born with big natural ones if you really want her to have them as in to be brought back in time to 2000 to buy MM or AFK at some reasonable price.

you use that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.

this is exactly what is wrong with this hobby and that's why you are now paying $9000 for a new pin.

It should never be an investment, it is a thing for your enjoyment. You should be able to afford it and justify it or not. Otherwise you just add your expenses to the price and artificially counter depreciation. People more "silly" than you pay more dollars to buy it from you and also add their real and imaginary expenses to the value and you have price hike which ultimately hurt you as well (and everybody else) because it happens to the other machines you'll likely to be buying in the present and future. The whole things is a zero sum game: no one gets richer, because you all use funds from price-hiked sales to pay more and more money for other machines, and all those machines should have retained same value (or decreased in value, in real world with healthy economic rules). You insert more funds into a system where countervalue of merchandise doesn't realistically match it. One day, someone refuses to be "the biggest fool" and starts the chain reaction of bubble burst. Just think of a housing market crisis repeated in pinball. It will happen unless you guys find way to match the pinball market by getting increasingly richer in the real world. Or else divorce lawyers would only profit.