Was it the Intel switch that enabled bootcamp though? That's clearly a better solution than maintaining a windows emulator, but does it meet the same point?
Not only did it enable Boot Camp, it also enabled third party Windows VMs like Parallels and Virtual box, and third party Windows API reimplementations (namely Wine)
Was there never any native virtualization on the PPC chips, or were there just no software written for it? I guess there was never much demand among Mac users to virtualize on PPC.
It did, but that was a really low priority for Apple: they shipped two generations of Intel Macs before releasing Bootcamp and the firmware updates that added BIOS emulation. They would have switched to Intel regardless of whether it gained them any form of Windows compatibility, because they needed more efficient processors.