The purpose of the console emulation is to mimic the kind of "noise" one gets running a signal through an analog console strip. There are a series of electrical circuits/bits between the input and output and all these have a small effect upon the sound.
If you are talking about analog channel strips and purposely driving them into saturation and on into distortion, then your answer is yes. But you can do that, I suppose, with any single "analog" emulation whether it is a compressor, eq or whatever. A mic preamp w/ gain and output control is the most obvious example, although any digital unit that has an input and/our output knob could work. The Neve preamp is the the first model that comes to my mine (and its clones). By balancing the ratio of in and out knobs you can drive the unit, adding "hair" to a sound to make it bigger. You can also drive it into outright distortion, so a DI'ed guitar sounds like it is going through an amp. Depending upon the quality of the design and components (and the talent of the enginner), these effects can sound "good' like a professional recording or simply sloppy and bad. That is one reason people pay hefty sums for analog units - quality costs. A cheap IC preamp overdriven sounds like someone beating a cat - all scratchity (which may be valid as a technique but not something I want to listen to continually).
You may like the digitial emulation of this. The coders try to replicate the sound of all the bits and pieces of electronic circuitry a signal passes through. Personally, I've never taken to digtial distortion or channel emulation. It makes the soundstage cloudly to my ears, and I have some good outboard I can use going in if I want the thing the digital is trying to imitate. but others dig it. Craig Anderton put up a tutorial on using the SONAR console emulation and it works for him. So try it for yourself. It is called art, not science, and I don't think even the BBC still has their engineers running around in lab coats.
good hunting,
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