[Maximus]

You are over-extending Markus post. The VM steps you enlisted up are for a VirtualPC emulator, and they needs not to be 'explicit'. A VM can be shaped in many forms, with implicit or explicit flow and myriads of variants, you would agree that the bulk of a scrambler and a (not complex) VM might have syntactic similarities. The big difference lie on the _semantic_ plane, on structures that are built over them - which magically appears if and only if you are aware of the game you are playing.
You can reverse a VM in little time if you know what you are looking, or just go mad for indefinite time. From a coding point of view, the result can be similar. There lies Markus assumption, i suppose.
Coding a VM however requires more than an interpreter. You are translating code out its original machine, with all the implications of the case (we could go on theory with Church/Turing theorem, goedel incompleteness etc. etc. but it's boring).

Maximus