what the OP is asking about is not duplication or cloning, it is "emulation" and the statement about it being piracy is fairly accurate, but the desire to use such technology for entirely innocent purposes is valid & while the manufacturers can assume the worst intentions, I think we can get further with this discussion if we don't assume the worst from our peers. The vast majority of us have been around these boards & this business long enough to be well aware of the nature of intellectual property, and well aware of the comparisons between software piracy & theft of our own design work.
The need to be able to do design work at home, or in different parts of the office from where one's equipment resides is a very real, very common & very legitimate need for many of us. This is one reason various manufacturers have created design station versions of the software that, while not free, do present us with the opportunity to have a much more convenient solution for one of the needs that leads to a legitimate desire for dongle emulation, and at a vastly reduced price in some cases.
Gerber for example produced a design station alternative to Omega, which will not run an edge, but the files it saves will load up properly on the full version & output just the same. I wasn't interested in paying the $700 price tag, but then they offered it free with the $500 upgrade to 2.0 (or was it 2.6?) so now I have it & it is a convenient option. If I had a full time designer & a full time production person, both needing omega all day, or even half a day each, with time lost in the ongoing struggle to trade off time in the program, then $700 would have been a fine deal, as I'm sure it was for others.