Well, Try developing an emulator some day... Optimization is unimportant in heavy development stages. Its not so surprising when you get into the code and try improving a trivial problem and the optimized code is 10x harder to work with.
And as for the "only the linux/macos folks seem to enjoy desmume" line, thats a bit disappointing that we're an only just because we're the smallest group
Actually, I'll be honest, I didn't know DeSmume was opensource or ran on Linux. I would've gotten it by now. I probably will get it sometime. Right now No$GBA and iDeaS work absolutely great in the latest Wine GIT, and its great. As for touchscreen support, its trivial if i remember correctly - you just put two integers (don't know the size but i could guess its 8 bit or 16 bit, or we could look at another DS emulator) and change a bit of memory for if its being touched or not. I'm not absolutely sure.