It is funny how we always want what we can't have. Back in the day, what made the great analogue consoles great was that they were as low distortion/noise/colouration as possible. The lengths that they went to to give pure sound was pretty incredible. The objective as to be as neutral as possible. Well now we have digital, which when done properly is completely neutral and transparent... and we pine for the sounds of old and emulate it in our DAW :).
Same deal with e-pianos. The original goal was to try and give you a piano that wasn't some massive grand piano, something you could actually carry with you. However they didn't really do a very good job of sounding like a piano. They kinda did, but they missed the mark pretty far. So now we have top notch digital sampling, wonderful grands on any keyboard... and we then sample and/or emulate those e-pianos, because we want that sound too :D.