LUNs in ONTAP are first class citizens, no NAS emulated LUNs or anything like that. You talk natively to the array using LUN semantics and it reads/writes data to disk.
WAFL was originally developed for NFS, so when we added CIFS as a first class protocol you would say that it has an emulated CIFS layer on top of NFS? We don't translate CIFS connections into NFS, and we don't translate LUN calls into NFS/CIFS. We do take all of those protocols and use WAFL to efficiently write them to disk (via RAID, another abstraction layer).
Now, why would it matter anyway? I'm not sure I understand your point. Other vendors may indeed use emulation. If it works, has performance (e.g. good SPC-1 results), and generally acts like a LUN, I wouldn't care if they emulated & virtualised (Virtual SAN type LUNs?), or had craftsman hand-carving each bit lovingly into the disk. Why would a customer care? Price, performance, features, stability of company, partnerships, vision. Those are likely much more important.